


Salt and Pepper

by gutterandthestars, luoniiel



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Action/Adventure, Art, Avengers Tower, BAMF Bucky Barnes, BAMF Pepper Potts, Big Gay Revelations, Bucky & Pepper Are Bros, Bucky Barnes Needs A Friend, Dirty Martinis, Drinking and Dancing, Getting Together, M/M, Olives, Pepper Is that Friend, Pining Supersoldiers, So Many Olives, tower fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-30
Updated: 2020-11-30
Packaged: 2021-03-09 18:40:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 29,527
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27670802
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gutterandthestars/pseuds/gutterandthestars, https://archiveofourown.org/users/luoniiel/pseuds/luoniiel
Summary: In an alternate post-Civil War universe, Pepper Potts strikes up a friendship with a recovering Bucky Barnes. While Bucky pines for the oblivious Steve, Pepper’s day job as CEO of Stark Industries is about to get challenging. Will they stay out of trouble? Will Steve get a clue?On the way to find out, there will be dancing, drinking, dirty martinis, and dastardly plots. And snark. Really, quite a lot of snark.With amazing art from luoniiel!So much thanks to Alison, Parker and Rachael for beta, cheerleading and troubleshooting.Written and illustrated for the 2020 Not Another Stucky Big Bang.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Comments: 75
Kudos: 178
Collections: Not Another Stucky Big Bang 2020





	1. Chapter 1

Pepper thinks it's Tony's fault — if it's anyone's — for walking backwards out of the elevator mid-conversation and not looking where he's going.

“—and I thought we could stay in, order pizza, you and me, maybe a little jazz, okay not jazz, forget jazz —” he's saying, as the doors open on the Avengers' common floor to reveal its two existing occupants.

“Oh!” Pepper exclaims, lifting her fingers to her lips in surprise. Beside her, Tony whirls around with one bare hand extended protectively, his breathing shallow. They're faced with a scene that’s… 

Well, Pepper isn't sure quite what it is.

Pepper has met Steve Rogers on numerous occasions. He's staunch, polite, and nearly always, when he's around Tony, just skirting the edge of mildly disapproving. She's found Captain Rogers to be a kind man, a stubborn and smart man — every inch the national paragon of virtue. So she's a little surprised to see him pinning someone to the couch with a throw pillow held over their face, to all appearances intent on their suffocation.

The setting sun casts deep lilac shadows and a warm orange glow, lighting the rest of the room as it drapes over deep armchairs and low coffee tables, and reflects back at them from the antiquated gaming system and flat-screen TV that Sam Wilson and Rhodey set up to spite Tony. There’s the lingering smell of something deep-fried and Pepper notices takeout containers on the carpet. The Captain's — victim? An intruder? Impossible — the man, at any rate, is kicking and struggling to get free from the Captain’s grasp. His socked ( _wait_ , thinks Pepper, _socked?_ ) heels are scrabbling for purchase, powerful thighs straining against his jeans. For a moment, Pepper's a bit concerned she'll have to call security on _Captain America_ but then reality reasserts itself: FRIDAY still hasn't said anything, and she can see Steve Rogers is laughing and it's only a moment before two hands — one flesh, one metal — gain purchase on the cushion, wrench it free and slap it upside Cap's face. Steve sits back on his knees to scramble out of range, but loses a foot between the couch cushions, his arms windmilling helplessly before his assailant tackles him back into the far end of the couch and kneels on his chest, both men in fits of giggles.

Pepper feels her cheek twitch with reflexive amusement — again, it's _Captain America_ — but Tony is frozen beside her and she's got just enough time to think _uh oh_ when he pivots on his heel and strides back into the elevator, before turning to address the room and making a jerky little wave.

“Cap. Barnes. Not that it's not a pleasure, but. Gotta thing, you know. Science. Waits for no man.”

Tony is everything but smooth, gesturing with both hands towards the upper floors.

“Pepper. You know where to find me.”

The steel doors slide closed. In Tony’s absence, silence descends.

This is not the first time Tony has left Pepper in the lurch, but this is so abrupt she's still a little shocked. Left lurching, in fact.

At least this time she knows why.

Pepper sighs internally, turns and puts on her best diplomatic smile. She takes a breath. The occupants of the couch have sprung to their feet, and Captain Rogers' fists are not quite clenched. His friend looks blank and grey eyed and wary, and oh joy, yes, it's up to Pepper to repair this. 

She crosses the room, hand outstretched, relying on the notion that these men, one way or another, have a century apiece of ingrained manners to carry them through. Thankfully, she's right, as Steve visibly recovers himself and shakes her hand.

“Captain Rogers,” she greets them, “And you must be Sergeant Barnes.” He, too, grips her outstretched hand.

“Yes ma'am,” says Barnes, and smiles carefully. She can read the caution in his eyes.

The handshake is with his non-metal hand, so Pepper feels skin meet skin. For all her familiarity with alloy suits and hardware — quite possibly because of it — there's something about the prosthetic that creeps her out. She thinks it’s unfair of her, really. This model is the gift of their new friends in Wakanda: Princess Shuri has imbued her work with golden warmth for the soldier newly come in from the cold. But still, part of Pepper shrivels inside thinking of its predecessor, and Tony, and everything that’s happened to them since the diplomatic conclusion to their conflict over the Sokovia Accords. 

Pepper hopes she lets none of this show on her face.

“I'm Pepper Potts. It's a pleasure to meet you at last,” she tells Sergeant Barnes. She forces her own smile to reach her eyes.

“Not sure Stark shares the sentiment,” says Barnes, with a twist to his lips, as Rogers winces, “But thanks. I'm glad to be here.” It seems Steve can't help but cheer up a little at that gruff ray of light, however brief. So there's hope, some improvement. Good.

“So I saw,” she tells them, raising an eyebrow at the disordered couch, and she's rewarded with some supersoldierly shuffling of socked feet and exchanged glances; Pepper has a brief vision of the pair of them as nine year olds, late for class, in trouble for picking fights.

“Do you need anything?” she asks. “Contacts, moral support, Hamilton tickets, baseball seats, takeout recommendations…? Anything. Really. We want to provide you with whatever you need, despite Tony’s… impulses. He means for you to feel at home. He's trying.”

It’s Barnes’ turn to wince, Steve Rogers tenses his lantern jaw.

“No, thank you, Ms. Potts,” says Captain America, and Pepper decides it's time to leave these two to get on with their evening. But, just in case… Their brittle and precarious peace seems in need of a boost. Pepper and Tony together have enough on their hands, but that doesn’t mean she can’t spare some time to see if she can’t make some of this easier. Pepper's got one or two irons in the fire, a few ideas taking gradual shape.

“It's Pepper, please,” she tells them. “We're holding a — I won't say a party, Tony hears the word and all of a sudden everything all becomes a bit much,” she explains, “but a gathering. Of friends. Here, Saturday. If you feel up to it, you're both invited. As is Sam Wilson, if that sways your decision either way.” 

She knows Wilson and Steve are close, and the former pararescue veteran is reaching out to Barnes in a way she doesn't quite understand but seems to involve a lot of sniping at each other ( _poor analogy_ , she tells herself) and odd male bonding rituals. It's love or hate, or both, she's not sure, but Steve shows no signs of letting either of them go, so they'll have to come to terms with each other eventually.

True to form and expectation, Barnes snorts at the mention of Wilson, and Rogers smiles.

“Consider it in the diary,” says Steve.

“If I can, I will, ma'am,” says Sgt. Barnes, and Pepper nods. She feels she's done what she's able to here. Tricky situation managed; damage controlled. She straightens her blouse, winces at the pinch of her shoes, can't wait to get out of the heels with a limited comfort period that expired around an hour ago. She gives her goodbyes.

“Now,” she announces, “it seems my evening contains pizza, not-jazz, and almost certainly hard liquor, so I'll leave you to your own devices; I'll no doubt find Tony somewhere upstairs fiddling with his. And I'll see you Saturday, if not before.”

“Good evening, Ms... Pepper,” says Steve Rogers. “And, uh. Thanks.”

The elevator doors are cool beneath her fingertips. She gives the men a parting wave, before stepping away.

As Pepper leaves, she catches a reflection in the mirrored wall of the elevator. The doors close on a muttered conversation, one contrite man with a metal arm, his shoulder gripped and shaken by the only constant person in his long, horrible life, Steve looking earnestly into his face, sharing encouragement, maybe some comforting words. Who knows.

_So that's the Winter Soldier,_ thinks Pepper. _Huh._

===

_So Howard's kid's got a girl,_ thinks Bucky, vaguely, as he and Steve are left alone with the light, bright mood of earlier snarled back up into a hemp-rough tangle of frayed edges and misery. All his limbs are tingling and his thoughts are fuzzy. He can’t feel his tongue. He tries to focus, slows his breathing.

Bucky’s not great with people these days, but Pepper Potts seems alright. She's more confident in her space than the women he remembers from before the war; softer somehow than Peggy had been; more tired than the Black Widow, but also more hopeful. _More forgiving than Stark, apparently,_ he thinks and that’s when Bucky retches, dry, in the back of his throat.

His head is full of heavy coils and static, but some detached part of Bucky Barnes reckons that, statistically speaking, his stomach has now likely spent more of his life feeling queasy than not. He’s unironically sick of it. He feels the rasping hacks he’s making, rather than hears them over the ringing in his ears and in his brain.

Bucky is peripherally aware that Steve is close and grasping his shoulder. Steve is talking; it's something kind and unbearable, and useless, and undeserved.

As long as Bucky's known Steve Rogers, which is a pretty damn long time, Steve has always clung to the stubborn insistence that _talking_ can make a difference. Words are the Steve Rogers first line of defence and the first tool in his arsenal of attack. Bucky hears them now, golden things, fish-bright, whole shoals spooling out over his head and tangling in his hair, wriggling their way insistently into the cotton muffles of his brain. Sure, Steve backs the talking right up with actions, but first and foremost Steve will give a speech or a warning; shoot off his mouth till someone breaks their fist on it. No matter how many times he'd been punched in the face for attempting it, Steve thinks challenging bullies with words is not just moral but worthwhile. Even when the bullies are thoughts in a man’s head. 

Steve had once taken his relentless, goddamn righteous, sunshine words to the right recruiting office, and somehow persuaded a kindly intentioned scientist to make him into the world's first successful supersoldier. 

Bucky’s life doesn’t work like that. Ever since Bucky had been drafted, his voice has been effectively irrelevant; can't talk your way out of a draft. Or the muddy realities of the war in Europe. Bucky had marched, had been captured and tortured; Bucky had fought, and fallen and been remade, gagged, erased, and sent out as an angel of death, and in not one of these situations would his words have made a difference. He still has vague echoes of a memory, looking up at Alexander Pierce and whispering words that wouldn’t leave him alone: “But I knew him…”

Honest words, thinks Bucky, that led only to a slap in the face and ultimately, his own erasure.

He’s thinking more clearly now. Steve continues to murmur some nonsense, and actually, Bucky thinks, in the end, even during that whole nightmare, Steve's words had been the thing that made a difference. “I’m with you to the end of the line,” he’d said. “You're worth it, Buck.” 

Steve’s words get through, sometimes. Bucky hoards those things close now, like he hoards all his memories of Steve. But he can't currently hear over the ringing in his ears, and he's lost the fraction of fleeting peace that came from fighting for fun with cushions rather than knives. He does the breathing thing his therapist showed him.

That’s where Bucky’s at: he's seeing a therapist now; talking, to make a difference. 

He’s also slowly making connections that aren’t Steve. It’s not coming easily to Bucky. He’s assured he was smooth, once. He sure isn’t anymore. He does talk to people though, for whatever it gets him. Talking doesn't seem to do anything to dissuade Sam Wilson from disliking him, not that Bucky's tried, but nor does it encourage him to keep his distance, so Bucky has the Falcon up in his face at least once a week for training, for 21st Century ribbing over traded and telegraphed punches — _“it’s called smack talk, Barnes, you walking anachronism,”_ _“Yeah? You want a smack in the mouth, huh?”_

It’s not a social life, but it’s okay. It seems to make Steve happy.

What Bucky wants from Steve isn't words, not really. Closeness, whatever closeness he can offer, Bucky will take it. Hoard that too. He thinks it’s always been that way; he can feel the shape of the old ache in his gut, a place to tuck things away when they’re too near what he really wants. A place for his wants. Yeah, he thinks that’s an old thing, another tragic chasm that Bucky can’t save himself from plummeting into. Another problem his words won’t solve.

Bucky breathes deep, clinging to the moment and not the roaring tide in his head that threatens to climb down his throat and drown him in despair. He feels the puff of Steve's coffee breath on his face, and the soothing noises if not the words themselves, the heat of another body, the weight of his own through the flats of his feet and the smooth floor through his socks.

Steve's still talking, grip strong on his shoulder while Bucky's mind finds its way back to his body.

“You with me, Buck?” he hears, eventually, and he shakes his head — _not yet_ — and lets Steve lead him to the couch with its scattered cushions and sit them both down, Steve's wide hand rests warm on the back of Bucky's bowed neck. He breathes, sinks into the cushions. Steve squeezes, hesitating before he lifts his hand away. Bucky steels himself for the chill as the touch departs.

“You wanna talk?” asks Steve.

Bucky lets his head thump back on the sofa and groans.

===

Tony's not in their apartment, but Pepper finds him in one of his workshops in the tower's basement levels. He's jittery — more than usual — and pounding some sheet metal with a hammer.

He looks hollow; sweaty and frustrated, which is a terrible look on Tony but far from unprecedented. Neither of them have ever worked through anything significant together without a lot of yelling and hitting things. She hopes this particular crisis blows over without recourse to tears and explosions, but she can tell it's early days. How is nothing easy? Money can buy you happiness but Pepper thinks they've both learned that when what's needed is peace, there's no substitute for time and hard work.

Pepper resents no one but HYDRA. And Tony, occasionally. But only when it's his fault. This isn't. She knows that.

“I blew it. I know I did,” he says, looking up and sounding defeated. “Dropped you in it, same as always. My bad.”

“I handled it, Tony,” she sighs, loitering in the doorway in lieu of braving the obstacle course that is the workshop floor. A spindly robot trundles up to hand her a plate of pink wafers, which she politely declines. The disappointed noise it makes as it retreats is nearly enough to melt the hardest of hearts, but not enough to sell her on stale cookies.

Tony casually throws his hammer to the floor, swivels on both heels, away and back, as if undecided about his available exits, before raising both hands and dropping them back to his sides and clenching his fists.

“Look, I get… Hmm,” he presses his lips together and sighs at the floor before twitching his gaze back up to meet hers. “I get that it was all Double-Nazi brainwashing and torture. I get that. And that makes me feel like a tool, boy does it ever. Because I can't look at him, Pep, I can't look at him without thinking about — What he's done, what he's taken, from… from…”

Pepper is across the rough concrete floor in a few strides, heels be damned, wrapping her arms around Tony, carding through his hair, murmuring what she hopes are comforting sounds, letting him sink his forehead into her shoulder.

“I'm sorry, Tony, I'm sorry. The whole thing is so screwed up.”

Tony sobs, almost. “It would be easier to hate him for it, I _should_ hate him for it; how do I hate _me_ for it?”

“Who knew that narcissistic tendencies could have a downside?” she says lightly, scratching gently with her nails, and Tony snorts wetly into her blouse. “As far as it concerns anyone else, it doesn't matter what you feel, it matters what you do. And, Tony, you're doing everything just fine. He lives here, in your building —”

“Our building,” mutters Tony.

“— our building,” agrees Pepper, pulling back to look him in the eye. “And don't think I don't know about what you did to that man on the security detail you overheard insulting him, or the veteran incentive scheme, or the reduced rental rates for every retail store that hires amputees on levels two through four. You've made space for him and Steve, somewhere Barnes can start to feel safe. Somewhere he can see people who look a bit like him. You've also managed to do it without getting creepily over-involved, which, really Tony, is, I think, a new high for you, so if it's personal growth you're looking for, well there it is. I'm proud of you, truly.”

Tony shakes his head and Pepper kisses him amidst the engine parts and iron filings, the lingering acrid smell of solder overlain by recently abused metal.

“What'd I do to deserve you?” Tony croaks into her ear. She giggles, ticklish.

“I think dominant public opinion is that you don't,” she tells him, and smacks a kiss on his cheek.

“Mean, definitely mean, probably fair,” he says, pulling back to look her in the eye.

“They don't know you like I do,” Pepper promises him, leaning in again.

  
  
  



	2. Chapter 2

Promising a party means _planning_ a party, and while party planning is second nature to Pepper, these days she’s grateful to delegate. Her workload is ludicrous; she's currently managing a Stark Industries corporate merger with a second tier energy company, along with her regular duties as CEO, and, in her spare time, she’s managing her own emotions while trying _not_ to manage Tony's. 

_Intense_ , _is the word_ , she thinks.

The bulk of her waking hours right now are taken up with cramming for the ongoing negotiations with EDGE Corp. It involves a lot of meetings, decision making, and review of recently completed corporate investigations. Preliminary details are done with; it'll be a mutual agreement, it's no hostile takeover. Pepper thinks they've broken the back of the worst of it, and now it's mostly haggling over a redistribution of the existing roles of the EDGE senior management as they transition to Stark Industries oversight over the next few weeks. Their current CEO Is angling for a role in taking the company forward under their new management. Pepper’s honestly considering it. Pepper and her acquisitions team have by this point made most of their major decisions. The process must be honoured, though, so now she’s participating in endless discussions, smiling and nodding on cue. 

“...developed a rating system for selection criteria, rolled out by regional management and personally reviewed by Linda, our Business Manager…”

Pepper nods encouragingly while the lawyers take abbreviated notes with sharp pencils, and the young employee taking the minutes types frantically.

Pepper fiddles with her Mont Blanc fountain pen. Her mind's wandering as lunchtime approaches.

At least there will be food at the party. Tony's specification was American burgers and Kentucky Fried Chicken. Pepper had taken the liberty of instructing caterers to source a local equivalent. Tomatillo dip, mayonnaise for Tony, something called Salad Cream for Sam Wilson who once told her he picked up a taste for it in Europe during one of his tours... Oh god, she needs to stop thinking about food.

Pepper adjusts her skirt, pays polite attention. She thinks they've spent enough time covering this ground, but EDGE Corp CEO Hank Wallace is currently taking far too long to say something straightforward.

Pepper refocusses, considering her soon-to-be-employee. Is he the right person to keep hold of the reigns after the transition, to integrate into a new environment? On one level Pepper thinks he seems like the usual corporate blowhard in his late fifties, a heavyweight former engineer with real expertise behind him. For some reason, though, Pepper thinks she reads something brittle, more insecure, behind him as well. He’s prone to recounting his successes to reassure himself rather than to inform her and the room. He and Linda Argyle, his Business Manager, seem to have some sort of mutually codependent self-appreciation society going on, but given her history with Tony, Pepper’s hardly one to judge in that regard.

Pepper supposes Wallace does have something to prove. He's holding out for a role rather than a golden parachute. Will he be able to let go of control? It sounds like a good company. Good staff; good results, albeit stagnant growth over the last half decade. They've just gone as far as they can go. Stark offers new opportunities for them and their people — who they seem to genuinely care about. And Pepper has concluded that, on paper at least, Wallace would be a competent, safe pair of hands.

There’s just something a bit off. 

Pepper files it away as something to look into. Between now and the final sign off the following week, she's throwing a party to encourage an awkward WWII POW back into what passes for society in the Avengers circle. And before that, lunch.

“I think this is a good opportunity to break here,” says Pepper, becoming aware if she doesn't interrupt they'll be here all afternoon. People on both sides of the table cease their twitching and sag in relief. 

Caterers bring in their trays, and Pepper takes a tuna salad, smiling as she chews her first bite. 

Hank Wallace's manner is abrupt and his posture defensive, but he takes a sandwich all the same.

===

Given what little Bucky has to occupy himself during his newfound freedom, Saturday sure has rolled around fast. The common floor of Avengers’ tower is Stark’s preferred party venue, apparently. Some pop music with a beat is jarring Bucky’s senses and he is propping up a wall, drinking sugary lemonade, eating breaded chicken from a punnet, and avoiding Sam Wilson.

Natalia Alianova Romanova is dancing with Steve Rogers. Poorly.

Well.

Steve is dancing poorly. The Widow is graceful as ever, and surprisingly good humoured.

Bucky is taking a break from the sensory overload and the room's low light is helping a little, though the bold decor is nearly as loud as the sound system. It's toeing the line of discomfort but Bucky doesn't want to give up and just leave, not yet. He can't handle Steve's sad face and he just knows the hangdog, loyal bastard would feel the need to follow him upstairs. And he wouldn't want Steve to miss out on further making a fool of himself on a jerry-rigged dance floor with the world's second most feared, former brainwashed, cold war assassin.

Watching Steve ain’t no hardship either. 

Bucky can grant that Romanova’s also worthwhile watching, though as much for what she might be up to, as for the pleasure of the aesthetics. No, he’ll keep his eyes on Steve, thanks.

It’s strange, he thinks. The Winter Soldier knows the Black Widow. Natasha Romanov, on the other hand, is a stranger to Bucky Barnes, and she's Steve's friend. It makes Bucky shy and pink with misplaced jealousy, and he downs his drink in disgust at himself. He takes a look around the room.

The lights are fashionably low, the towers of Manhattan glittering through the fancy floor-to-ceiling quadruple reinforced windows that Clint Barton had dragged him out to take pot-shots at, just to prove their resilience. Say what you like about Stark, his windows stand up to sniper fire and the best of Barton’s exploding arrows. “Forgiveness is easier to seek than permission, dude,” Barton had told him cheerfully, as they peered down their scopes, then winced so hard Bucky’d thought the Hawkeye had broken his own face. Again. “Sorry, man,” he’d said, sheepishly, and Bucky had waved it off. 

Fucking HYDRA have a lot to answer for.

Bucky stares out towards the skyline. The low clouds reflect the city lights like a bruise, a deep yellow. Around him, fun is being had, he supposes.

Tony had bailed early on, but the other James, Colonel Rhodes, disappears and reappears throughout the evening, looking alternately battered and amused, so presumably Stark’s somewhere hiding away from Bucky. Bucky tries to meld his shoulders more firmly into the wall.

The boppy dance number comes to an end, to be replaced with a slower, heavy beat and on the polished area of floor, Bucky watches the friendly combatants separate. Steve bows, the fucking dork, and Nat quirks one sculpted eyebrow in amused derision, before sweeping low to the floor in a ballerina's curtsey. She turns in a half pirouette as she walks away, shooting finger guns at Steve and sauntering off, the hem of her dress swishing around her knees.

 _What a pair of squares_ , thinks Bucky, shaking his head.

Steve makes his way over, as Bucky chews thoughtfully on a greasy chicken leg. Behind Steve, at the bar, Colonel Rhodes is mixing some cocktail with Pepper Potts, who's rummaging in the cabinets below the row of optics and passing out jars of increasingly unnatural coloured preserved fruits. Rhodes, still shaky on robotic legs — Bucky feels both guilt and fellow-feeling like a kick to the ribs — is fooling around with the shaker and has to dive and catch it as it slips. Pepper tosses her head back and laughs. 

Needled with more reminders that he’s intruding, Bucky turns instead to Steve, pink from dancing. Bucky hopes it's a flush of embarrassment; it should be embarrassment after that performance. Steve catches his eyes and beams, greets him with a ‘hey, Buck’, and settles next to him. 

They prop up the wall together, shoulders resting side by side. Bucky feeling himself calm slightly. Across the room, Potts and Rhodes have miraculously succeeded in creating drinks for themselves and the clink of their glasses as they toast rings sharp in his enhanced ears.

“So, Howard's kid's girl, huh?” he asks, eyes narrowing and jostling Steve's elbow, as he nods at Potts.

“Yeah, she's something alright,” agrees Steve, shoving back.

“She shouldn't lose out if Stark can't bear to be in the same room with me and Rhodes is… temporarily incapacitated. You should ask her to dance. Can't leave a good woman wanting for a dance partner, huh Stevie?”

“Yeah, I don’t think my skills are up to that task. You should, though,” he offers, like some kind of lunatic, as if Bucky is in any way a functioning approximation of good company right now.

Bucky snorts and Steve glances at him sidelong, raising an eyebrow in challenge. 

“Unless you’re not up for taking a crack at some 21st Century dance moves,” he says, knowing exactly what he’s doing. “You intimidated by my superior experience?”

Bucky humours him and takes the bait. “I may not be known for my dancing these days, but if you can do whatever you call that just was,” he says, gesturing to the impromptu dance floor, and Nat, who has gravitated back there to gyrate lazily and alone, “I sure can."

Steve swats him on the bicep, laughing. Steve looks lighter when he's like this; a far cry from the reflected pain of Bucky’s bad days. Bucky thinks maybe he owes it to Steve to try to be this unbound man he wants to see, to keep Steve smiling as much as he can.

“Think she’d respond to the ol' Barnes charm?” Bucky asks, desperately hoping it’s not obvious how he’s straining to find the lightness he’s trying for.

“What's that, you say?” asks Sam Wilson, strolling over to butt in. Still, Bucky can play nice. For now.

“Stark’s not around, and Steve thinks if he can show the Black Widow around the dance floor, I can ask Pepper Potts to, what was it? Show me some moves.”

“Buck…” begins Steve, a crease starting to form between his eyebrows. “You don’t have to.”

“I can be smooth,” Bucky protests, hamming it up. 

“Oh I wouldn’t…” starts Steve.

“I'm getting snacks,” says Sam Wilson, cutting Steve off and striding off to make good on his word, and dammit now Bucky has to follow through. He glares at Sam's back and Steve laughs.

“Ok, Buck, ok,” says Steve, smiling and so fond.

Giving Wilson’s retreating posterior a final glare, Bucky pushes off the wall and heads over to the bar. Rhodes sees him coming, makes his excuses, grabs a bottle of tequila and lurches off, which honestly is probably the least awkward of their options right now, so whatever.

“Ms. Potts?”

“Sergeant Barnes,” she greets him. 

“Would you like to dance?” asks Bucky, putting on what he hopes is an appealing human expression.

“I have a drink that I’m enjoying, thank you,” says Potts, gesturing with a martini glass.

Bucky glances back at Sam and Steve who are making encouraging, ‘go on, go on,’ motions.

“Are you sure you wouldn’t like to be persuaded?” he tries.

“What’s my incentive?” she asks.

“Well,” says Bucky, nonplussed, not really thinking clearly apparently. “You’re here, I’m here…”

Pepper snorts. “So… You think that’s all it takes?” she asks him, all big blue eyes. 

“Uh.”

“Because, really, I have a room full of willing dance partners and only one drink so…” she shrugs.

Bucky turns helplessly to look at Steve and Sam who are crammed together on a couch sharing a bowl of popcorn, blinking innocently. Sam's cheek is bulging like a gerbil's with handfuls of the stuff and Steve has a red plastic cup of 21st-century-recipe cola held to his lips. They're both watching as if this is the best show since Howard Stark toured with his very-nearly-almost flying car and a troop of showgirls in fishnets. Fucking rubberneckers.

“Eyes front, soldier,” says Steve, smirking, and Bucky turns back to see Pepper Potts twinkling at him. She lifts the cocktail stick, removing the olive with her teeth, not breaking eye contact.

He feels himself visibly tremble, just a little. Pepper Potts notices, he's sure, from the slight uptick of her lips.

“Oh, at ease, Sergeant,” she tells him, apparently relenting. “I like charm, I do. We should do this again sometime. But you should know what you're getting into. No interrupting drinking for dancing. Proper reconnaissance next time, thorough intel before initiating action please.” She telegraphs her intention and raises a gentle hand, and Bucky lets her tap him twice on the check with the pads of her fingers. She winks. “I’m not opposed in principle.”

“Yes, ma'am,” says Bucky. He swallows, and to him the click in his ears sounds like the loudest thing in the room.

“It's a pleasure, James,” concludes Pepper, appearing to let the ’ma’am’ slide, twitching one sculpted eyebrow and sweeping from the vicinity.

Bucky is left standing in the middle of the room watching her walk away.

He's having what Sam calls _“a moment.”_ He can feel his mouth curling up at the corners. He thinks she’s right, he needs practice at this.

His moment ends when fucking Wilson strides up behind him and smacks him on the shoulder.

“Oh, Barnes, that was _poetry_ ,” crows Wilson. “It was _beautiful._ If I could bottle this feeling, I'd be the most popular man at the VA. It was, what's the word? _Healing._ Never stop being you.”

He claps Bucky on the shoulder again, with a parting grip and a shake, and strolls off before Bucky can work up the presence of mind to punch him. Steve approaches, snickering like the rat-bastard he is.

“Buck, I have to hand it to you, that was the most fun I've had since Dum Dum asked Gabe for French pick-up lines. Forget getting me anything for my birthday. We're good. That more than covers it. Really, pal.”

“Fuckin' jerk,” Bucky mutters, turning his face up to Steve's and doing his best pout. Steve's grin is incandescent as he throws a tree-trunk arm around Bucky's shoulders and drags him in the direction of the bar.

“I'll buy you a beer. For crashing and burning. Captain America insists,” Steve tells Bucky, in his Hearty Encouragement To The Nation voice.

Bucky's memory is more than a little patchy these days but he still remembers he'd been watching Steve strike out with every girl Bucky had set him up with between 1935 and 1943. Steve Rogers does not get to tell him about crashing and burning.

“It's a party. The beer's free, jackass,” he complains.

“Clearly it takes more than a smile and a handsome face these days, Buck,” says Steve, tossing the compliment out like it's nothing, just more ribbing for his best friend and not salt in a wound filled with Steve’s casual compliments. 

Bucky feels a pang deep in his long-bruised chest, and shoves it away. The Winter Soldier was no stranger to pain. This pain is all Bucky Barnes, and he's used to it. 

_Pack it in, Barnes_ , he tells himself. _Don't go raking up things that can't and won't be how you like them to be_.

“Get me that beer, Rogers,” he says.

===

Pepper walks away from the blushing Sgt. Barnes and parks herself on a stool, wriggles her toes in her shoes, swirls the dregs in the bottom of her glass and counts down from ten.

On six, Natasha Romanov appears at her elbow.

“I take it that you saw that?” asks Pepper, watching Steve Rogers drag his oldest friend to the bar.

“Oh, I saw,” says Natasha, with a gravelly chuckle. “I'd say don't go too hard on him, but that would be no fun at all.” She takes a slurp of cola and perches on the next stool, offering Pepper some toffee popcorn.

“I'm not sure what that was?” she asks, selecting a puffy ball from politeness and wincing at the tacky coating under her fingertips.

Natasha tosses a popped kernel into her mouth. “Putting himself in the line of fire for the sake of Steve Rogers? I'd call it a lifelong pursuit,” she opines, crunching on the corn.

“That was for Steve?”

“To show him he's fine, he's his old self, turning up the Brooklyn charm, schmoozing the ladies? Cutting a rug? Yeah, I think so.”

“Hmmm,” says Pepper, replaying the last ten minutes in her head.

“How's the energy merger?” asks Natasha, changing the subject. _Of course the Black Widow keeps her eye on Stark Industries' business_ , thinks Pepper.

“So far? Straightforward enough, more or less,” she says stretching her neck to tilt her jaw to the ceiling. “How's the… spy business?”

Natasha cocks an eyebrow. Pepper winces, scrunching up her face.

“You know everything about me, I know nothing about you,” she tells Nat. “It makes for trashy small talk, okay?”

Natasha smirks into her glass and takes a long slurp of her drink.

Watching Natasha let herself look smug, Pepper has an idea, feels a switch flip on; can nearly visualise the lightbulb floating above her.

“Actually,” she begins, “That’s a thought.”

Natasha inclines her head to one side in inquiry.

“I could use a spy, now I consider it. There's something odd going on with the CEO at EDGE and I can’t put my finger on it.”

“Wallace?” asks Natasha, well informed of course.

“Yes. He's competent, successful, innovative, refreshingly short on obvious bullshit, all these things are good. He talks the talk, seems to genuinely care what happens to his people…”

“But your instincts tell you otherwise?”

“Ugh, it's something.” Pepper makes a frustrated flick of her fingers. “I don't know. Paranoia? But he seems very keen to convince me of his excellence. It's like... with every word out of his mouth he’s… constructing the image of a successful person for himself? Which makes no sense because he _is_ a successful person. And on paper he's got nothing at all to prove, he's an ideal choice to stay in place for continuity. I don't know what it is, I don't know. He’s trying too hard.”

“Unknown unknowns, the spy's least favourite thing,” says Natasha, slowly.

“I wondered if you'd be willing to dust off your Natalie Rushman persona?” asks Pepper, hesitantly. “Or, I don't know, your face might be a little well known these days…”

“Don't worry about that,” dismisses the Black Widow with a tut. “Plenty ways around that.”

“Right. No professional offence meant.”

“None taken. What do you need?”

“I want to know the view from the ground. What do his employees think about him? The ones he hasn’t planned and primed for these talks.” Pepper’s talking herself through it as much as Natasha at this point. “At the moment, all I’ve got is data — which is good, financially — and his words, and the words of his upper management. The voices I’ve heard from could be carefully curated though. I want to hear the candid opinion of the people in the satellite offices, the people who have to work for him. Not his inner circle.”

“Seems fair. I can dust off my temping shoes,” smirks Nat around a cheek-full of popcorn.

“Go for flats, seriously!” Pepper warns, before she feels suddenly glum. She looks into the bottom of her glass, swirling the ice cubes around again. “I’m just… I'm getting Obadiah flashbacks...” she says, quietly. Natasha looks up at that, but says nothing. Pepper carries on. “I’ve dreamed about him, Obadiah Stane I mean, recently, a few times. Woken up, heart racing. I don't know, it's not the same but... Wallace is big, competent, charming, pragmatic… I don't know. Maybe it's just me. Old fears, you know?”

“I do,” says Natasha, “and I’ll do it,” she tells Pepper, decisively.

Pepper almost decides to backtrack, pausing when Nat holds out the palm of her hand: stop.

“And if it's nothing,” says Pepper’s new favourite spy, “it's nothing, and you can sleep better. Isn't that the dream? As it were?” she concludes, a small lift to the corner of her mouth. 

“Thank you,” says Pepper, gratitude and some measure of relief flooding her fingers and toes. “I know it's small potatoes…” she offers. Nat waves this away.

“I'm Russian. We can make vodka from even the smallest of small potatoes.”

“Ah, of course, my mistake,” says Pepper with arch graciousness.

“Speaking of alcohol, _‘another?!’_ , as Thor would say?”

“Another!” agrees Pepper.

===

Later, Pepper catches Steve Rogers by the elbow and tugs him off to one side. “What was he like, before?” she asks, nodding at Bucky who's scowling at Sam Wilson over some sort of card game they're holding with Rhodey and Dr Helen Cho.

Steve smiles, looking at Barnes as he slaps a card down on the table, then somehow comes unfocussed as he looks further, into the past. 

“He was a rascal,” he says, eventually, as she watches his face relax into a faraway smile. “Used to try and find us double dates, not that any woman looked more than once at me when he was in the room. They only had eyes for Bucky Barnes. He used to take ‘em dancing, buy them drinks, charm them. He was excited for the future, you know?” Pepper smiles encouragingly. “He was wowed by Howard — that was until he met him, of course,” Steve caveats with gentle snark.

Pepper can't suppress her laugh. She'd never met Tony's parents, couldn’t have done, not that she’s about to bring that up, but the apple doesn't seem to have fallen too far from the tree. Steve turns to look down and echoes her with an amiable huff; his eyes are sad, she thinks. They pull themselves back from across the decades to meet hers before glancing over to Bucky and then back.

“I'd hoped the future would have contained kinder miracles than these,” Steve says, lashes falling against his cheeks.

Pepper blinks. She hadn’t pegged Captain America for a sad poet, but that’s… tragic. 

“Sorry,” he says, after a tense pause, aware he’s made it awkward.

“Oh Steve,” she says, exhaling a gust of air, not realising she’d been holding her breath. “Don't take this all on you. It’s none of it your fault, and you’re not the only person in his life here for him now either. Which is what I wanted to ask about actually.” 

“Oh?” says Steve, raising an eyebrow. “How so?”

“Well maybe he and I could make friends,” she says.

Steve looks befuddled. “Really?” he says, then looks guilty. “Uh, not that I’m… That’s not…” He stops. He doesn’t seem to know how to recover himself. Pepper takes pity.

“What, no _‘shared life experience_ ’” she teases, and now both Steve’s eyebrows are attempting to meet his hairline in mild panic. “I’m not saying it’s comparable,” she tells him, “but do you really think I can’t relate to an unwilling experimental test subject facing a frightening new future?”

Steve draws in a breath, holding it in a long pause before letting it out through his nose. He seems to consider her more seriously. “I would never, Pepper,” he tells her eventually, entirely earnestly.

“You want to keep him all to yourself?” she suggests instead, joking. 

He flushes. “God no!” he blurts and blushes. This seems like an overreaction.

“No?” she asks.

“No! Bucky… he deserves friends.” Steve looks chastened. Pepper doesn’t let him wallow.

“You've said genre fiction, futurism, mechanisms, drinking and dancing,” she tells him firmly, “I’m sure there’s something in there we can bond over that isn’t endlessly depressing.”

“He's reading something called the Earthsea Trilogy,” supplies Steve, “only there seem to be more than three books?”

“Hmm,” she says, tapping her finger against her chin and smiling. “Not my thing, but I think we can think of something. Leave it with me.” 

Steve nods, a crease between those noble eyebrows. He seems to take this as a sign of dismissal, because he makes his excuses and heads off. She lets him go bother the four card players, angling his head over Sam Wilson’s shoulder and visibly pissing off both Wilson and Barnes as he does it. 

Pepper’s tired, and Sunday’s her day off but she’s beat. She gives her goodbyes, calls it a night and heads on up and home.

 _So_ , thinks Pepper, in the privacy of the elevator as she checks out her reflection and pokes at her hair. Bucky Barnes likes the ladies, and used to like dancing, and reads fantasy. Pepper is less well schooled in the last of those, but dressing up and going to bars? That she can do. 

She’ll make a point of inviting him out for a drink. They can practice dancing. And then at the very least there will be more alcohol, which Pepper suspects she will need.

  
  



	3. Chapter 3

Another morning, another meeting. 

Courage is a funny old thing, thinks Pepper. She's never been more frightened in her life than she had been walking down the corridor of what's now her own goddamn company to sneak into Obadiah Stane's office and whip out those plans from under his nose. Pepper had no defence from Obadiah’s towering physicality, had he decided to overpower her. But that's an old nightmare. 

This, on the other hand, does not require Pepper to be brave.

Right now Pepper is perched in a leather upholstered swivel chair, rocking one spiked heel to and fro, listening to financial experts talk in one of Stark Industries’ New York presentation rooms. EDGE Corp management have come here for another in-depth grilling. She’s feeling distinctly better about her corporate risks now she knows she’s got the fallback of Nat’s snooping in some of the satellite offices upstate. The meetings are friendly but thorough. She’s used to getting her own way in a room full of business people — mostly men — not by manipulation, but just being better prepared and more well informed than everyone else in the room. 

People think Tony's the arrogant one, and well, yes. But Pepper's always known she's the best at this. 

These days she's a lot more physically confident too. Being an AIM guinea pig had, ironically enough, burned a lot of that out of her. She’d had a chat with Bruce after he'd napped through most of Tony's caffeine and insomnia fuelled monologue and after she’d got him a real place to sleep and fed him tea and swapped yoga tips and set down and talked like human beings — not something Tony has ever truly mastered. She's coming to terms with her new and borderline unreliable body modifications, just like half the people of her close acquaintance. God, Rhodey’s doing so well. Better every week. All of them, all the time, getting better and better, whether it looks like it or not.

Natasha's offered sparring sessions. Pepper's not sure she's up to that yet. She's not that brave. That reminds her — where was she?

Oh. Courage. Yes. Comes in all packages. 

Speaking of packages, take Captain America. And frankly, _someone_ should take him. Like. Know him. Biblically. There's no evidence that anyone _is_ though, to Pepper's vicarious disappointment. She's got Tony, loves Tony, of course, but she also has _eyes._ And a healthy imagination.

Natasha had, before it all imploded so awfully, been doing her best to set Steve up with the available women of SHIELD; Pepper respects the Black Widow and can appreciate another competent woman when she sees one, but seriously. Whatever she's doing now SHIELD’s not around, it's not working. Pepper just thinks this is a crying shame. Pepper had met Peggy Carter a few times when she was still making appearances as Director Carter, and had thought it was almost a let down, for, oh, feminism or somesuch, that she’d fallen for Steve Rogers: America's Ultimate Jock. Then Pepper had met the man face to face and thought, _alright then. Fair enough._

It's not just that Steve Rogers is a large slab of Man, though it's that too. It's that Steve Rogers is so damn righteous. Pepper can appreciate that in a person. He works well with women too, at least in the professional sense. Maybe being weak gave him empathy or some such, but he's always seemed to appreciate competence in all its flavours. He's certainly shown Pepper enough respect. She knows if he's calling her cell, it's really bad. Usually PR related or Tony related or, lately, tentative Winter Soldier integration related. Pepper always helps. She's not got Phil’s — may he rest in peace — hopelessly star struck crush but it's flattering.

Steve — and it’s mostly normal now, but sometimes it's still a little jarring to Pepper to be on first name terms — seems to be adjusting as well as possible to the modern world. He's got Sam Wilson and Natasha, people who have his back as friends, not just coworkers. And Clint and Bruce when they're around. Thor's not often on-planet, but then it's not like he's going to be helping anyone adjust to New York in the 21st Century. She's seen his table manners.

Pepper doesn't think Bucky Barnes has yet to develop the same confidence, apart from some nuclear level bickering between him and Falcon, and some kind of wary respect for Natasha.

She thinks she’s made the right decision to invite him out. He needs a friend.

===

Later, Pepper's in her office reviewing quarterly forecasts on five separate screens when there's a polite knocking from across the room. 

“You asked to see me?” says a hoarse, quiet voice. 

She looks up to see the former Winter Soldier hovering in the open doorway. He looks like he's been called into the principal's office, or possibly summoned by some senior officer back in his army days. He looks, thinks Pepper, like a man prepared to clean a lot of toilets with a very small toothbrush. 

“Yes!” Pepper chirps, attempting to project friendliness, and beckoning him in with one hand, triggering her lock screen with the other and banishing the financial documents with relief. “Oh, thank you for coming. Do sit down,” she says, gesturing at one of the couches. “I hope it wasn't too much of an imposition.”

Barnes looks baffled, as if travelling a dozen or so floors of the building he lives doesn’t make it onto the list of things he's expected to call an imposition. On the other hand, it looks to Pepper as if it might currently be top of the separate list of things that make him most uncomfortable. 

All this is written on the front of his face. Pepper thinks he probably makes a better soldier than spy. _Perhaps that's the purpose of the goggles and the mask_ , she thinks, then mentally shakes herself.

 _Macabre thoughts aside…_ thinks Pepper, as she circles her desk and sits on a low chair opposite her guest. She smiles and scoots forward to pass him a cookie tin. 

Bucky Barnes looks at Pepper, looks at the cookies, and takes one gingerly, with a grave ‘thank you’. 

Pepper ducks her head and bites down on her cheek to avoid laughing.

“I assumed,” he begins, metal fingers gripping the knees of his pants. He swallows awkwardly. “I assume I’m here because you have a problem,” he says. He doesn't specify whether he thinks he’s the problem, or whether he’s Pepper's preferred solution.

Pepper smiles warmly at him.

“Not at all. There's no problem, or,” she gestures to the phalanx of computer screens with a huff, “none you can help with anyway. We seem to have gotten off on the wrong foot, Sergeant Barnes,” she clarifies.

“Ma'am?” he asks, looking at her askance.

“Pepper,” corrects Pepper, firmly. 

“Uh, sure. Pepper,” he repeats. “Call me Bucky, or James, if Bucky is too… um. Weird. For this context.” He gestures vaguely at the room.

“It’s not weird at all,” she says, frowning. “But James is a perfectly not-weird name too, and if you’re more comfortable with James from me…”

“Yeah, maybe normal is better… James Barnes,” he says, as if testing the sound of the name. Pepper doesn’t get it, but it makes no odds to her.

“Okay. So. James. Have another cookie. Have you been exploring New York much since you’ve been back?”

Barnes — James — tilts his head. “Oh, I went around the old neighbourhood, paid more money than reasonable for a paper cup full of milky coffee, did the tourist thing…” He tightens his fingers, gripping the knees of his jeans. “It was… Weird. I don’t remember much. And I hated the subway. I used it, but it wasn’t an experience I’m eager to repeat.”

“Ugh, I can’t imagine,” Pepper tells him, with a shudder. “No old drinking haunts?” she prompts.

“Who would I go out drinking with? Steve’s too recognisable, I’m too recognisable when I’m with Steve. Wilson and I have an unspoken agreement that our interactions have to involve the three ’S’s: Steve, sparring or sports.”

“Perhaps drinking would help,” jokes Pepper.

“With Wilson? Nothing helps,” says James with a wry smile to show he too is joking. Politely. 

“Perhaps with a different drinking buddy?” asks Pepper, proud of the segue. Oh God, now she’s thinking about Obadiah again. Anyway. “I thought you and I might hit the bars? If you like?” she continues. “I need some time out with not-Tony and not-work, and I’ve never really made the time to make friends locally. I’ve always been a workaholic, and Stark — the company and Tony — have always taken up all of my time. And frankly I could use a break.”

“Oh,” says Barnes, visibly relaxing. “Yes, yes, if you’re comfortable with that.”

 _Oh_ , thinks Pepper. _That was easy._

“Of course, James. Or I wouldn’t ask. And there’s a place I’ve got in mind, so I suggest we take a private car straight from the garage and then neither of us need to worry about the subway, or being recognised.”

“I’ll need to know where we’re going beforehand,” he cautions her. Pepper kicks herself for not having thought about that. Of course he’ll be nervous in public, he has every reason to be jumpy. 

“I’ll send you details so you can scope out the place in advance,” she assures him. “It’s close by.”

“Then it’d be an honour.” He’s scrunching his face up as if the next question is painful. “Ugh, forgive me for not finding a less awkward way of asking this, but is there anything specific I should wear…?” 

Pepper grins. 

“Smart casual,” she tells him promptly. “Ask FRIDAY what that means… or Sam Wilson…” she suggests, nibbling slyly at her own cookie.

Barnes curses under his breath, and smiles back. He eats his third cookie, seemingly more chilled out now.

“Anything else I need to bring?” he asks.

“Just yourself!” she tells him, brightly. “Use your judgement.”

He nods seriously. “Nothing else I need to understand that you can think of?”

“No?” says Pepper, slightly confused, but happy to help. “We’ll go to the bar, we’ll drink some overpriced drinks, we’ll be driven home. Garage to garage, no detours,” she promises. He must be worried about exposure to the public and the uncertainty of their itinerary. She hopes she’s dispelled that sufficiently. Private cars are safer for both of them, she thinks.

“Then if that’s all?” he asks. Pepper stands, extending a hand. Barnes shakes it solemnly. 

“Til later!” she assures him.

“Til later.”

“I’ll see you at eight, James Barnes,” she tells him, with a wave, as he leaves. 

She turns to her desk before he’s shut the door behind him, logging back in with a deep sigh, pulling up her notes and buckling down for the afternoon, her mind already far away from the frowning man making his way back to his apartment. Gosh, she hates financial reports.

===

Steve has gone out by the time Bucky steps from the elevator into their rooms.

Well.

That was odd. He knows someone as well connected as Pepper will have their own security team. He’d met some of them, including Happy Hogan who seemed to take his role to the point of obsession, but that was good. He was paranoid. Bucky can appreciate that in a person. Also, is it really paranoia if people are frequently out to get you? Bucky thinks not. For whatever reason, Pepper has asked him, and he knows he owes her and Stark. More than he could ever repay.

And so, he prepares. He dutifully downloads Pepper’s link to the bar website to his tablet and uses the internet — _‘So helpful,’_ oh Steve — to call up maps and reviews. He finds what’s called a 360degree walkthrough which is, indeed, very helpful. He finds the best place to sit to ensure Pepper’s safety and makes a note to ask her if she can use her reputation to secure it for them. He identifies exits and spends the afternoon preparing contingency plans. 

He’s not been personal security for an important person before so he plans accordingly.

He cleans his guns, organises his knives. He feels calmer after this. At some point Steve gets back, hot and sweaty from whatever he’s been doing — _Jesus, Rogers,_ he thinks, _goddamn, warn a guy_ — sees Bucky’s busy and makes him sweet tea — _‘thanks, Steve’_ — and claps Bucky on the shoulder before disappearing off to shower.

Weapons checked, cleaned, and selected for invisibility, Bucky takes Ms. Potts’ advice and asks FRIDAY for help finding clothes. Between Bucky’s burgeoning — returning? — sense of modern style, the unnervingly feminine AI, and the existing contents of Bucky’s wardrobe, they work out an outfit that fits his form in a way that’s pleasing to Bucky’s finicky and developing tastes, and also provides suitable folds for weapons concealment. He’s got three ceramic throwing knives tucked up in his hair, a tiny handgun strapped to his ankle, various other knives in strategic pockets. He wonders about club security, but he’s confident the knives at least will pass a metal detector and honestly, he’s halfway sure he can bank on the bar’s muscle being so uncomfortable about the metal arm that they don’t pry further.

He changes back to soft leggings and baggy t-shirt for his afternoon workout, spars with Steve which, regretfully or fortunately, ends in the two of them rolling around on the floor of the gym, neither willing to yield or able to find an advantage over the other that doesn’t involve serious injury. Eventually it turns into a tickling contest, which Bucky loses shamefully, till Sam arrives and tells them to ‘get a room’ — _‘bite me, Wilson,’ ‘you wish, Barnes,’_ — and they all head up to Bucky and Steve’s place for chilli and rice. God, he loves chilli. 

Sam and Steve settle in to watch some hockey game Bucky can’t bring himself to care about. Bucky showers and dries his hair, puts it half up, replaces the knives, checks his guns, gears up carefully, dresses in the clothes he’s prepared earlier.

He surveys himself in the mirror: black on black, shirt buttoned to the second to last buttonhole, reliably intimidating but common enough to be presentable. And damn smooth, if he says so himself. Which he does, to the mirror.

“You still got it, Barnes,” he tells his reflection, as if saying makes it so. It rings a little hollow.

He checks and triple-checks his weapons, curls a wayward strand of hair around a damp finger and tucks it behind his ear, makes sure Steve and Wilson are at least two rooms over before twirling around to check out the lines of his pants where they fold over his ankle holster and possibly also admire his own ass in the black jeans. 

Satisfactory.

Prepared as he’s ever going to be for this impromptu undercover security gig, Bucky Barnes heads out — ‘ _have a nice evening, Buck!’ ‘yeah, yeah’_ — and makes his way down to the garage.

He’s certainly had worse missions. 

===

Pepper takes Bucky to a club-slash-bar she’d seen in a magazine. Her PA, Hayley, had assured her it was discreet and classy and unlikely to be the haunt of overly nosy people.

Happy Hogan, bless his Sylvester-and-Tweetie themed cotton socks, looks, well, not happy at all, as he drops them off, but Pepper's Talked To Him About This. She may be no match for the Winter Soldier but she can more than handle Bucky Barnes. Happy's not convinced, and she's half expecting him to hover outside in the street behind some poor disguise or an extra large newspaper just to make sure. He’s given her a panic button, which she tucks into her purse. 

James had been visibly uncomfortable in the back of the car, but relaxes slightly by the time they’re led to the table he’d selected in advance. It’s a quiet, private corner, away from the speakers. He places himself between her and the room, angled — she presumes — to give himself a wide view of the club. He seems at ease in the chair, right hand resting on the table. He’s dressed in black, which Pepper thinks washes him out, but is undeniably tasteful all the same. There’s a slight bootcut silhouette to his pants and the tailored cut of his untucked shirt is probably bespoke. He’s not wearing gloves, but his sleeves hang low enough over his wrists that he can be discreet about that if he needs.

He’s surveying the room, posture loose, though Pepper is sure he’s aware of her scrutiny. She should stop sizing him up, really, and make conversation. She opens her mouth to say… something… to break the ice, when they’re interrupted by a member of the waitstaff with a tablet and a discreet request for their order.

Barnes waves away the offer of alcohol, asks for seltzer water, which gets him an odd look from the server. Pepper decides not to comment; she’s no idea what his doctor is prescribing him, if anything, but she and Tony know from experience that mixing anxiety medication with alcohol can have unfortunate results. God, that was a nightmare evening. They’d been more careful about reading the small-print after that. Pepper won’t pry. Perhaps he doesn’t like how it makes him feel? She can understand the desire to maintain control. Pepper orders a martini, thanks the server and leans forward to make conversation over the low thump of the music and the noise of the bar.

“So. What’s troubling you?” asks James, as they adjust awkwardly to each others’ company. Pepper takes the prompt with gratitude.

“Oh, it's work,” she explains. “I’m shepherding a merger over the next few weeks and it’s been super straightforward, which means there’s something horrible lurking just around the corner. At least, that’s what my hyper vigilant, paranoid brain is telling me,” she adds.

“You’re expecting retaliation of some kind?” asks Bucky — James — leaning forward on the table. He’s attentive, though Pepper has no doubt he’s aware of the rest of the room. They neither of them have their backs exposed. Pepper shudders just to think about it, and considers the question. 

“For the merger? No, it’s amicable. But industry-wide, we’ve created a lot of resentment in the energy business — oil companies don't like our renewables, the arc reactor was a game changer — honestly the list of people who'd like to have my head is… long. It’s long. Very long, and…”

“There have been particular threats against you recently?” James asks, sharply, as if she’s been remiss somehow, and Pepper hurries to reassure him.

“No, no, none. I would have told you. I’m not anticipating any trouble,” she says hastily.

Barnes is interrupted in his response by a waiter, who deposits Pepper’s martini and a tall glass of sparkling liquid with ice in the middle of their table before wafting off to another task. Pepper takes a grateful sip, sour and sharpness strong on her tongue.

Bucky sets his water aside.

“So if you don’t mind me asking, ma’am, is there any reason you wanted me here and not your regular detail?”

She blinks at him. “Detail?” she repeats, without understanding. Then revelation dawns, and she feels her face fall. 

Oh.

“James,” she tells him, one hand resting over the sad tug in her chest, “you're not here as protection.” She watches that sink in, James’ brows beetling, mouth tugging to the side, big, confused eyes looking up to meet hers. 

“Sorry,” he says. “I assumed… Well. I assumed that I was. Uh. Why…?” he trails off, less than articulate. Pepper leaps to reassure him.

“Not that you wouldn't make an excellent bodyguard,” she tells him, taking a chance and patting his arm where it still rests on the table. “I feel very safe. I thought you could use some time out from the madhouse with someone with more sense than — hmm, really, any of your colleagues. Who aren’t Sam Wilson,” she amends, conscientiously. 

That seems to do the trick, whether through distraction or otherwise, since Barnes takes the bait. In fact, she seems to have released a monster.

“Sam Wilson tells anyone who’ll ask, and some that don’t, that he’s there to do anything Steve would do,” he says, tossing one hand to the ceiling in despair. “He’s not enhanced. He’s just nuts. He volunteered for an experimental military programme that strapped a couple of jet engines to his ass and gave him _wings_. He had the opportunity for a sensible life and threw it all away to chase me around the globe with a man he’d just met — yeah, yeah, they’re soulmates, I know —” he says, before Pepper can interrupt. She laughs. “He’s Steve’s crazy, bird-brained twin, why does no one see this?” James laments.

“He just seems so put together,” Pepper murmurs, amused.

“It’s an act. He’s a terror. Let Wilson be Wilson, the stubborn, suicidal, hyper-competitive bastard that he is.”

“He’s a good man,” says Pepper, outright grinning now.

“He is,” admits Bucky, with a reluctant twist to his lips that makes him look like a stray cat in a downpour. “Now we’ve established I’m not here on the job, if we’re talking about Wilson, I need a real drink.”

“Noted,” says Pepper, and twists to catch the attention of one of the staff.

  
  



	4. Chapter 4

Bucky orders his beer. Pepper has a thought.

“Wait, did you ask me to call you James out of some kind of professional distancing thing? Are you…? You seem to prefer Bucky with the rest of the team…” 

“Uh, you can stick with James, ma'am, if you like. I have memories, now, muddled, but some. I’ve been called James by people I respect, so. ‘Have at it’, as Monty used to say.”

Pepper beams at the implied compliment.

“I swear, James, on Thor’s ridiculous hammer, call me Pepper. I get ma'am enough at work, so god, no, enough. And I think we can do this,” she gestures back and forth across the table between them. “Friends as equals. I mean, I’m not as bad as Sam, right? We can power through this awkward thing and have a drink?”

James laughs. “No, you’re not as bad as Sam,” he agrees.

“And there's got to be a happy medium for me between work sycophants and Tony.”

Barnes snorts. “That's me, ma'a - uh, Pepper,” he corrects, when Pepper shoots him a warning look, complete with intimidating eyebrow.

“…good…” she says.

“Neither one thing or another. Practically destined to be out of place, the weary middle, the man out of time… Adrift in the snowdrifts of endless winter…”

“I said _happy_ medium. No one told me you were a huge drama queen, Barnes,” she says, and Bucky laughs.

===

An hour or so later, there’s been alcohol. It has helped. Pepper squints at her companion, who is currently quietly detailing why he finds Spiderman so annoying, with intense venom. He’s got as far as, ‘…and nobody should ever be that young…’ when Pepper interrupts.

“James Barnes, are you drunk?” She has a thought. “Wait, _can_ you get drunk?”

James takes a swig of his fourth beer, frowns at it and then at her. 

“Yes. Don't try it with Steve unless you like wasting a lot of money achieving nothing at all.”

Pepper leans in conspiratorially, teetering on the edge of delightfully tipsy and silly-drunk. “Wasting lots of money to achieve nothing at all is actually kind of Tony's thing, so I'm familiar with the process, but no. I prefer my expenditure to be productive.” She slaps the table. It lands a little too hard. “Ow.” 

He leans back and spreads his hands.

“Well if your productive outcome was a maudlin drunk supersoldier, ta dah, I guess, Pepper.”

He smiles more like a wince. Pepper tuts and waves someone over so she can order them some water.

A smart, blond server in tight pants sashays over and Pepper notices James tugging the cuff of his sleeve over his left hand, smiling sheepishly, and looking up under his lashes as the man arrives at their table and smiles at them. It all seems very brief and unconscious. Barnes is turning to show off his good side maybe? Almost as if...

Pepper blinks.

Oh well, this _is_ interesting. Perhaps she can one-up the Black Widow after all. If she's reading this right, they could compete to set Rogers and Barnes up with dates, and it looks her odds are suddenly at least double in her favour over Nat’s by comparison. Assuming Steve Rogers himself isn't also hiding more than that wicked streak of snark behind his national icon facade and inhumanly chiselled abs. She cups her chin in her hands and leans forward feeling her lips curl up in a warm smirk. She waits till the waiter is gone, and waggles her eyebrows.

“James Buchanan Barnes, you don't just like the ladies, you like the gentlemen as well…”

Bucky pulls a guilty, mildly panicky face that he swiftly replaces with an unconvincingly bland replacement. 

“Don’t know what you mean,” he says, with no inflexion to his voice whatsoever. Pepper stares. James stares back. Neither blink, until James groans and drops his forehead into his palm. 

“Fine,” he groans, from between his fingers. “You got me. First time someone’s clocked me in the 21st Century, congratulations I guess.”

“Well, well,” she says, pulling herself together. “We can have some fun, can't we.”

James Barnes looks up, seeming surprisingly sanguine for a man who's just been outed, possibly for the first time since the 1940s, if ever. It was maybe a little insensitive of her to press. Still, they are where they are. Pepper straightens up and puts on a pompous voice.

“Stark Industries works hard to ensure all our employees and customers are treated with the utmost respect. It shouldn't need saying, but I am of course fully supportive of you whatever your orientation.” James squints at her, though he looks tentatively certain she's hamming this up for him. Which she is. He also doesn't seem to see where this is going. “However, Sergeant Barnes, I am off the clock. So. Humour me, please.”

“Ma'am?” he queries. Pepper rolls her eyes.

“Pepper. For example, that man's ass.” She uncurls her index finger from the stem of her glass to point at the waiter, who is leaning up against the bar.

James blinks.

“I'm not joking,” she says, firmly. “That ass. Thoughts.”

Barnes looks.

“It's a peach, Pepper, no lie,” says Barnes, eventually, seeming to finally relax into this, his right arm slung over the back of the seat, beer dangling from his fingers. Pepper has a moment where her vision superimposes an image of him in his uniform from the War. Sergeant Barnes would have been quite something. His smile widens slowly into a grin. 

“Okay, now how about —” starts Pepper, before she’s interrupted.

“Oh no, you don’t get to wriggle off the hook like that, _Ms. Potts_ ,” says James, eyes half-lidded, still slumped back in his chair. A curl of hair has escaped its clip and is poking out from where it’s tucked behind his ear. He looks like a cat again, this time telling the mouse how it’s gonna be. “We take turns, or this game is over.”

“Ohhhhh, I see. Well, if them’s the rules…”

“Them’s the rules.”

Pepper swivels to crane her neck and check out the scattered patrons of the club. There’s a man in a tank top shaking his stuff on the other side of the room. Pepper flicks a discreet finger towards him.

“Arms,” she says.

“ _Arms_ ,” agrees Barnes, “although, shoulders, eh,” he amends, tilting his hand to-and-fro in ambivalence.

“Steve and Sam spoil us in that department,” she agrees, and Barnes gives her a slim smile. “Though wait till you meet Thor,” she tells him. Barnes snorts. “And you’re no slouch yourself when it comes to arms and shoulders either,” she tells him, then feels her eyes widen in momentary panic. Barnes thankfully takes it in the spirit it was meant.

“I only get a fifty percent score there,” he jokes. “Princess Shuri has to take credit for half my resources in that department, but this one’s all me, so thank you Pepper.”

“In that _dep-arm-tment_ ,” says Pepper, relieved.

“Armoury,” counters Barnes.

“Arm-senal?” offers Pepper. “Arm-arda?”

“Stop, I’m begging you, have mercy. Anyway, you don’t do too badly, either,” says James, gesturing to, presumably, her arms. “If that’s not, um… If that’s not something I can’t say…”

“It absolutely is, and thank you, James,” she tells him smugly. “I work out.”

The server returns with their water at that point, so they both press their lips together until he’s gone away again and they can both laugh out loud again.

“Oh, that poor man,” says Pepper, wiping the corners of her eyes. “So, should I expect our objectification of random strangers to turn into intent to approach any of them on your part, or are you not ready for that?”

“Oh,” says James. 

“I could be your wing-man,” she suggests. “Oh, a wing-man, that’s…”

“I know what a wing-man is,” he says, his tone slightly odd.

Post-Killian paranoia, Pepper is getting better at reading people. He looks guilty. She narrows her eyes, squints at his face. 

“James?”

The man in front of her gusts a sigh and drags his mis-matched hands over his face, leaning forward onto his elbows. He peers out between his fingers.

“I have a confession, Pepper. That ain't gonna work.”

She rests her right hand on his left forearm, metal plates warm through the sleeve of his shirt and unyielding against her fingers. 

“James,” she tells him, “James, you have every right to want that or not want that, I'm not telling you what you ought to be feeling, but if this is about some false notion that you're not worthy or there are some logistical or, god forbid, PR concerns?”

“Yeah, it's not that,” he groans, “although, Jesus, thanks, yes for both the problem and the help with the solution. But it's never going to come to that.”

“And why is that?” she asks, gently as she can over the noise of the club.

“Alas,” he quips, with a pained and wry expression, “my heart belongs to another,” and there's that SciFi and fantasy influence, thinks Pepper. She wonders if anyone's shown him the Princess Bride yet. 

Wait, hold on.

“ _Who?_ ” she asks.

James looks at her from under those dark lashes, muscle jumping in his jaw, all steel blue eyes and ironic pity, though she suspects the pity is not for her. And, ah, yes, she really is ridiculous. She deserves that.

Pepper sits back, letting her hand slip from James' arm, her shoulders thumping against the high arch of the chair. “Oh,” she says. _Oh._ “No. Steve? Oh, James. Oh, really?” She brings her hand to her mouth.

She can't believe she didn't see this. God, it's so obvious.

Well.

She clears her dry throat and links her fingers together in front of her on the table.

“Well,” she says. “Well, yes, in that case I can see how by comparison that man's ass is really nothing to write home about.”

There’s a beat where James just stares, enormous blue eyes wide and shocked…

…and then Bucky Barnes cracks up in front of her, snort laughing and resting his forehead on the backs of his hands. There's nothing about this table that's anything so crass as sticky, and he rolls his forehead back and forth. His shoulders shake for a moment, and then he looks up at her, grin still wry, but bright.

“I've _been_ to war, Pepper. Can't say I wrote home about any asses.”

Pepper laughs. “ — for which your correspondents thank you —” she interjects, grinning, index finger in the air, before sipping her drink. She props her chin in one hand.

“Although,” he continues, with a theatrical sigh, and it seems to be all coming out now, “if I was going to, it would have been Steve's, that night he found me in Azzano, big like I'd never seen and those tights on under his combat pants.”

“It must have been quite a shock,” she says, because what else is there to say?

“There was a lot going on. And I marched by his side the whole way back to camp. There's incentive for not falling behind: getting caught ogling a national icon's ass. And I’ve been in love with him for much longer than he has had that body.”

Pepper has all the questions. For how long? Did you tell anyone? What was that like, in the 1940s?

She goes with, “Does he know?”

“Does he know?” scoffs Bucky. “Does Captain Oblivious, Commander of the Armies of the Blind To The Obvious, Greatest Tactical Dumbass Of A Generation, does he know I, James Buchanan Barnes, his ‘best friend from childhood’ has spent the better part of a century pining after his sorry, perfect ass? No, Pepper, he doesn't know. Do you think he’d be rolling around with me on sofas if he thought I was lusting after his fine body and noble soul?”

Pepper takes this in. She doesn’t have an answer to that.

“Well, shit,” she says, taking solace in her martini, draining it to the bottom. She picks at the olives for something to do.

“Yeah, yeah,” agrees James, “I’m pathetic.”

“More alcohol,” she tells him, with conviction, waving over a waiter.

====

They call it a night around half midnight and exit the club into a rainstorm. The place is fancy enough for the doorman to hold a couple of umbrellas over them, although Bucky doesn’t mind the rain. He lets Pepper fret over her shoes until Happy Hogan arrives with the car, and steps into the street, his shoulders already damp from the downpour. Bucky didn’t see him in the club, but he must have been hovering nearby. He smells of fried onions and strawberry milkshake. He glares at Bucky, even as he holds open the door for Pepper to duck inside.

Pepper is content to make conversation with Hogan on the way home. Bucky takes inventory on the inside of his head as they drive back: what he’s seeing, what he’s hearing, what he’s smelling — the wet-dog odour of damp clothes, car air freshener — what he’s feeling, physically. What he’s feeling, emotionally.

He’s surprised to find he feels okay. He certainly wasn’t expecting the evening to pan out like that, but it did and he reckons he’s okay with it. Honestly? It’s kinda nice to have someone to talk to about this shit. Bucky’s had a nice evening, made a friend.

Who’d have thought?

===

Pepper absolutely doesn’t stumble as she enters their suite in the Tower, choosing to make her lunge towards the floor deliberate, and bends to undo the buckles on her wet shoes. There’s a shuffling sound from the atrium and the soft shush of a sliding door. She hears muffled footsteps approach, and only staggers a little as she rises to see Tony leaning on the wall a few feet away. He’s in red satin pyjamas and bare feet, and he looks tired. It’s maybe 1am? Pepper didn’t check.

“So. Happy told me where you were,” says Tony, flatly. 

“You knew where I was,” she says, confused, stepping out of her heels and tucking them into the cupboard by the door. “I told you not to wait up.”

She stands on one foot to massage her achilles, scrunching her toes into the thick pile carpet, before straightening up and meeting Tony’s gaze.

“You told me you were going out for a drink, you didn’t tell me who with!” He sounds genuinely agitated. Pepper frowns.

“We didn’t have much of a chance to catch up, it’s been a busy few days. You’re not usually like this,” she says, a touch sharply perhaps.

“You went on a date with the Winter Soldier!” explodes Tony.

“His name is James!” she snaps, feeling a flush of heat in her cheeks. 

“James?! James is it, to you?” 

“Tony.” Her voice lands flat. Tony looks wild.

“How am I supposed to react, hmm?” says Tony, pacing now. “When he… When you know, you _know_ ,” he says, staring at her with empty eyes, apparently unable to finish the thought. _‘What he did’_ , hangs in the air between them. “I’m not enough, am I? I’m never going to be enough, for any of you,” rails Tony. He’s panting, hands flailing. 

“Really,” says Pepper, tone entirely level, an odd pulsing feeling warming behind her eyes. “That’s what you’re going with? You’re telling me you think I’m having fun on the side with someone we’re here to support, someone recovering from unthinkable trauma, who lives under our roof. What, to spite you?”

“Well apparently I have to worry about these things now!” Tony roars, and Pepper’s world focuses down to a white hot point, the heat in her head blooming down into her chest. She might be glowing; she’s certainly aflame with rage.

Pepper grits her teeth against the burn and wills herself to keep it together. 

“Tony, he's in love with Steve, are you blind?” she yells. Hearing herself say it is like being drenched with a bucket of ice.

Pepper claps her hands over her mouth, horrified. That was given to her in confidence, she can't believe herself. To be fair, it's been a stressful few weeks, let alone the last few minutes. Still, what she’s just done is unforgivable. The heat inside her collapses like a failing waterspout, shame pooling around her feet, a residual flush all that’s left of her building rage. 

Tony, meanwhile, freezes. Pauses.

“Huh,” he says.

Pepper stands, rooted to the spot.

Tony tucks his chin down to look at her over his bug-eye sunglasses and steps back. He looks around, takes off his glasses and frowns at them, holding them up at arms length as if to squint through.

“Blind?” he asks. “Apparently so. Huh. Maybe these need to have real prescription lenses in them. FRIDAY, how long since my last optometrist appointment?”

 _“I’ll take that query as rhetorical, boss,”_ says the AI, from the ether. Somehow, she manages to convey the sense of someone very well trained exiting discreetly from the scene of barely thwarted personal disaster, although possibly that’s Pepper projecting.

“Tony…” chides Pepper, feeling guilty from her bare toes to the mussed up strands escaping the top of her chignon.

“No, no, see that makes an awful lot of sense,” says Tony, pacing, waggling a finger at her. “Of course! They live together, they fought together… I mean, didn't they basically grow up in the same Brooklyn tenement... Oh my god, I can't believe I didn't see this,” he says.

“ _Tony_...” says Pepper, but Tony's warming up to his theme. He waves his hands around.

“Steve is obviously besotted with him, I mean talk about obsessed, this makes everything so clear. How long has this been going on? Has Cap been tapping that since the 1940s? Oh my god, was Peggy Carter some kind of…” Tony trails off, comes to a stop, looks up at Pepper with a wounded expression. “How could he do that to Peggy? To her heart, to her legacy?! Howard _worshipped_ Director Carter, she was a living legend, I want to beat his ass just for the disrespect…”

Pepper intervenes before Tony marches downstairs and challenges Steve Rogers to a duel. You know, again. They’ve barely started getting over the last time. She grabs his wrists and tugs them down.

“That's what I'm trying to say, Tony. _Steve doesn't know._ ”

They’re staring into each others’ eyes. Tony _boggles._ He scoffs in disbelief.

“Oh. Well now, that's just ridiculous.”

“Yes,” agrees Pepper. “Like this whole conversation.”

Tony seems to consider that. 

“Yes, yes,” he agrees, hurriedly, “I can see an apology is in order here, I’m sorry, I’m sorry and I was… unreasonable…” he looks up. Pepper just nods encouragingly. “Needlessly possessive, jealous, self-absorbed…” Pepper’s smiling properly now, but doesn’t interrupt. “.. And generally a terrible boyfriend. Partner? Partner.” He takes a breath. “Husband?” he asks, presumptuously, mock-hopefully, ducking his head and looking up at her, knowing he’s being ridiculous now.

“Oh no,” warns Pepper, “you don’t get to propose after a pointless fight. You keep trying this, and no. Just no. It’s never going to work. When you propose, you’re going to do it properly or not at all. _Partner_.”

“Fine, fine, totally, fine,” says Tony, backing off. “So. Barnes and Rogers. Rogers and Barnes. Friends to enemies to friends to… what? Star-crossed sweethearts? Or is it really one-sided?”

“I don’t know, Tony.”

Tony leans back to support himself on a convenient cabinet, one handed, hip cocked. Something in his brain seems to present itself…

“’Course I can see Sergeant Arms's perspective here,” he says, thoughtfully. “There's the chiseled, noble brow, the patriotic stare —” Pepper nods seriously as Tony continues, it's really easier to let this run and she's got a fairly good idea of where this is going anyhow, “—that _body_ , really not to mention any of the, associated, proportional, classical, uh, assets, really — very — fine. Assets…” he says, finally catching her eye guiltily, “None of which, of course, compare to any of, um. Yours.”

Tony drops the sunglasses on the desk and steps swiftly into her space and yes, Tony is nothing if not predictably unpredictable.

Pepper giggles. Tony slides up his arm around her waist.

“You free now for hot, late-night, apology sex?” he asks, pressing their foreheads together.

“I could be,” she offers, smirking as sweetly as she can.

===

A fair amount of time later, Tony props himself up on an elbow and chirps brightly. “Really? Barnes is into that? And Cap doesn't know?”

“No, and you can't tell him,” scolds Pepper. Tony has got his strategising face on and she can _see_ the cogs and circuitry working. “Tony. Tony!”

“I wasn’t gonna,” he says, unconvincingly.

“Uh huh.” 

Tony sucks his teeth, tilts his head. “Though if I did, technically… you told me, so you broke confidence first, so, you know, if I did… It would be your fault.”

“Tony!” she groans. It’s too late for this nonsense.

“Yeah, yeah. Zipping it,” says Tony, flinging himself onto his back and lacing his fingers through hers. “Night Pep.”

Pepper’s already halfway to sleep.

  
  



	5. Chapter 5

Pepper has reached the age where matching drink for drink with possibly-enhanced super spies results in a rough couple of days, but professionalism still gets her up at 05:45, leaving Tony snoring and sprawled out on their bed.

Nat calls with an update on EDGE Corp while Pepper’s rubbing her hair down from the shower. FRIDAY patches Nat’s morning-growl of a voice through, at a tone and pitch sensitive to Pepper’s still ringing ears. None of them are twenty two anymore and Pepper is feeling every one of the extra twenty-odd years she carries on top of that.

Nat delivers her first report while Pepper’s working her pantyhose on over her knees. ‘Natalie Rushman’ has been taken on as the new PA for Wallace’s right hand and Business Manager, Linda Argyle, after the previous occupant of the post had been persuaded to leave at short notice. The former PA is apparently now gratefully set up somewhere in Stark Tower, PA’ing to his heart’s content for someone less capricious on a more generous salary. Nat is being put through her paces by Linda, whose role has her bouncing around between the New York offices and the satellites upstate. 

According to Nat, she hasn’t stabbed Linda but she’s really, really wanted to. While well-meaning, Nat is also finding Linda to be chaotic, fretful, and out of her depth, which in itself would be fine (if not ideal for the role) were Linda not coping with that by letting her chokehold control grip extend beyond the reigns of her own tasks and grasp everyone else's as well. Micromanagement isn’t the most efficient way to run a business across multiple locations, and Pepper listens as Nat describes a workforce straining at the bit, kicking against the goads, and other horsey metaphors relating to poor personnel management. 

When Pepper’s dressed, she switches to video-call. Natalie Rushman, with her scraped back blonde hair and oversize nerd glasses, looks exhausted.

“Spying is usually less stressful than this,” she says to Pepper, between deep gulps from a coffee mug that reads ‘Redwing Is My Wing Man’. “But I’m making friends among the support staff and the junior-to-mid-level engineers. I think I’ll have some more concrete impressions on Wallace himself for you in a couple of weeks.”

“First, not-concrete, impression?” asks Pepper.

“Wallace is a good engineer and also what Ant-Man would call a colossal ass hat,” said Natasha. “And Linda Argyle is a WASP — no pun intended — who stings everyone she interacts with. And they might be fucking. But that’s not enough of a reason for you to sack him, or her.”

“If CEOs were rendered unsuitable on the basis of colossal asshattery, or extra-marital affairs, truly the hiring pool would dry up quickly,” agreed Pepper. “I, myself, am a saint, of course.”

“Of course,” says Nat with a half-smirk, setting her empty mug to one side. “I’ll get back to you when I’ve made more connections here. I managed to persuade the accounting department to take me to a bar, I’m going to have to pretend to care about sports.”

“Oh no, a group of dude-bros?”

“Some of them? But mostly it’s women who’re all on the same softball team. I’m not stereotyping; they assure me some of their best players are straight.”

“Oh well that sounds far less excruciating.”

“Sports bar,” repeats Nat, drier than dust.

Pepper has moved to the kitchen and sets her own coffee going. Nat’s face hovers on one of the many holo-projections. “Your sacrifice is appreciated,” Pepper tells her, solicitous.

“As is your consulting fee,” says Nat, and jerks her chin. “Later.”

“Have fun!”

Pepper waves. Nat rolls her eyes and FRIDAY closes their connection. Pepper turns her full attention to her coffee and mentally prepares for her day. She sends a private message to Tony, sending her love and a selfie taken from over her coffee, and wonders how James Barnes is doing this fine morning. 

===

Bucky wakes up at the crack of sparrows’ farts every day regardless of how late his night, but he doesn’t have to _like_ it. He wriggles into some soft track-pants before staggering to the hallway. He checks in with himself. His brain is doing… Nothing. His brain is doing nothing. Okay. Today could go either way. He pads up the hallway to the kitchen.

The door to Steve’s bedroom is open and there are clean breakfast dishes drying on the draining board; Steve’s left the apartment. Bucky spoons two bowls of cereal into his face, takes his meds, steals the last of Steve’s Tropicana out of their fridge, and heads to the gym. 

By the time he’s back and showered, Steve’s returned from his run with Wilson, and Bucky makes a veritable keg of oily black coffee which they share over the breakfast bar — that’s a thing now apparently — while Steve reads an honest-to-god newspaper. They face the wide, bright windows, their backs to the kitchen. Bucky fiddles with his iPad, watches Steve draw tiny cartoons in the margins of the paper and lets himself enjoy the morning. It’s disconcertingly domestic, and Bucky’s not had a chance to get used to that feeling for a good, oh, seventy five, eighty years at this point. To be honest, it’s freaking him out a little. He can feel his leg bouncing, his foot hooked in the rungs of the bar stool. 

He nearly levitates through the double-height ceiling when he feels Steve’s warm and heavy paw drop onto his knee and squeeze.

“Relax, Buck,” Steve says, without looking up from the paper. “Before I take your coffee away.” 

Bucky scowls and clutches his mug closer. He feels an eyelid twitch. Steve looks up, then, dropping the paper, laughing at whatever expression’s on Bucky’s face. He withdraws his hand from Bucky’s leg, pinking slightly, and Bucky feels parts of himself clench up that shouldn’t really be involved in the process of coffee drinking or scrolling news sites.

“Fuckin’ try it,” he grunts to Steve, taking shelter in friendly aggression, tightening his fingers on the mug, but he does force his legs — and the rest — to relax. Steve huffs and changes the subject. 

“You survived last night then?”

“Yeah,” mutters Bucky, and Steve knows this because he’d waited up for Bucky last night, just to see him safe in the door, before they headed to bed in separate rooms, fuck Bucky’s actual life, which is a phrase he’s picked up from Maria Hill when she dropped in to spar with Romanov one time.

“Real detailed post-mission report, sergeant,” deadpans Steve.

“Screw you, it was nice, okay? We got to know each other a bit. We even joked about the arm. It was nice. We’re making friends. I can do that now, asshole.”

“That’s really great,” Steve says, with sincere puppy eyes. Bucky pokes him with the mug.

“Hell yeah, it was great. Lookit me, being all personable. Like a person…”

“You’re a person, Buck,” says Steve, seriously.

“Damn right, I am,” Bucky says, draining his coffee. “And this person has no plans for the rest of the day and still feels like ass after a late night. Wanna go for a walk round the park with a person, Steve?”

“Depends, is this person gonna get sleepy and cranky and panic while we’re on the other side of town and make me call a car like last time?”

“I didn’t make you do anything, you said it was for your sake as much as mine.”

“Yeah, because if I had to carry your sorry carcass home like a sack of potatoes it might draw some looks, and when I do things that draw looks, Stark gets emails, and then I get emails and then we’re all tired and angry, and all I want is to have a nice day. We gonna have a nice day?”

“No promises,” says Bucky. “But if you buy us hot dogs and churros the odds are looking better.”

“Hot dogs and a walk in the park. Life of Riley.” Steve smiles then, and Bucky goes all gooey and warm on the inside. 

Like he said to Pepper, he’s pathetic. 

===

Pepper stalls the EDGE Corp negotiations in discussion with Stark Industries’ lawyers, and they find some other minutiae to quibble over, to buy Nat some time to investigate and compile her report. There’s still plenty to be done running Stark Industries, merger aside, and Pepper’s grateful for the time.

At some point in the week, Pepper is raiding the Avengers common floor for bar snacks when Steve Rogers wanders in, retrieving a discarded hoodie from the back of a chair, picking up what looks like some paperbacks and an enormous soft drink cup.

“Oh, hey, ma'am,” he says, when Pepper pops up from behind the bar.

Pepper can feel her eyebrow draw upwards. "What is it with you _fellows_ and the ma'am-ing?" she asks, severely.

"Ms. Potts. Pepper," he corrects himself at her glare. 

God, but Steve Rogers is something else when he blushes. It's not like she doesn't see the appeal. And James Barnes shared bunks with this, all through their war, and an apartment before hand, and has kept his sweet, sarcastic mouth shut this entire time and well. Pepper is not having that. Tony's utterly unsubtle approach may not be the way to go, but Pepper is a professional mediator. She’ll think of something.

Steve, meanwhile, shifts from foot to foot, working up to something.

"I wanted to say thanks,” he says, eventually. “For taking Bucky out of this space.”

"Oh it was a pleasure, Steve. A joy,” she says, smiling and taking the opening to test the waters. "He's a handsome man, your James Barnes. I’m delighted to be seen on his arm for an evening."

"Oh god, now I'm getting flashbacks to every Saturday night between 1938 and 1944," groans Steve, pinching the space between his eyes theatrically. There’s no sign of hidden heartbreak, jealousy, melancholy, or anything behind the pained expression of a man flashing back to his embarrassing youth. Just fondness. “I did warn you; I don’t think there was a woman in Brooklyn he didn’t sweep off her feet, and onto some dance floor or other.”

“We didn’t dance, but I’ll suggest it next time,” she tells him.

Steve nods, bashfully, then stares off into the mid-distance in a very Captain America Contemplates the Landscape way. He seems a long way away again. Perhaps a hint of melancholy, thinks Pepper, but given their respective histories it’s hardly surprising. She hears James still has terrible bad days.

“Is he well today?” she asks, and Steve shakes his head as if to clear it. 

“Not great, but not terrible. We’re gonna watch movies and he’s going to bitch, er, comment about the stuntmen. Sam’s coming over. We’re fine,” he assures her. “He isn’t going to be painting the town tonight, but we’ll be okay.”

Pepper melts a little at the unconscious ‘we’s in that speech. Thinking of James and his hopeless, eighty-year history of torch carrying, Pepper can’t help poking at Steve before she leaves. Surely there’s something there. Surely.

“Maybe not,” says Pepper, “but don’t write off a night of dancing. You want to dance with him, Steve, just ask,” she tells him, before slinking out towards the elevators.

She leaves him spluttering. He’s blushing, he really is. Pepper files this away as circumstantial evidence, rather than anything concrete, but it’s adorable nonetheless. And hopeful. 

That’s as far as she goes with the needling; she’s not going to step on Bucky’s wishes, not this early in their acquaintance anyway.

Pepper’s bar dates with James Barnes become a regular thing over the next month, though, and now that Tony’s entirely on board, the hardest things are persuading him to keep his mouth firmly zipped, and persuading Happy to live up to his name rather than skulking outside of every bar and club she and James frequent on the island of Manhattan. 

They drink, they chat, sometimes they talk about Bucky’s pre-war life, sometimes they talk about Pepper’s faintly tragic but very ordinary upbringing. They talk quietly, in the more discreet places they frequent, about recovery, and control, and fear, and therapy and what a dreadful, awful, helpful process it is. Pepper talks about the furnace she carries under her skin, and her new fragility and her new strength. They mostly avoid talking about Tony, except in the abstract and with the occasional throwaway comment about Pepper’s days.

They visit libraries, instead of galleries, since Bucky seems to appreciate the quiet as well as the books. Sometimes he has to stop, and breathe, and Pepper waits. Sometimes he takes her hand, and they sit amongst the shelves and wait for as long as it takes for James’ mind to return to his body.

Sometimes, they talk about Steve. Especially when they’re both drunk, and the background noise of the bar is loud enough to cover up their conversation and save them from the ears of nosey people. Tonight, for example, a man in nondescript clothing is eyeing them from another table. Pepper gets enough of that sort of thing on the regular to be able to ignore it, and if she’s picked up on it, James has surely also noticed and dismissed it. They draw eyes, sometimes, the two of them, in public. They’re well known faces, after all. Just like Steve, about whom Pepper is grilling Bucky for insight into the man she still mostly knows as a figurehead rather than a person.

“He can’t possibly be as straight laced as he appears, James,” she’s saying, over her third martini. “I’ve seen him beat on you with soft furnishings on top of the upholstery. There must be more going on. Still waters run deep. Maybe that’s it. Perhaps he's a little kinky, don't you think?” says Pepper, probably unwisely, but too relaxed to stop herself. 

James doesn’t even bat an eyelid.

“Yeah, see you'd think that,” he says, gesturing with a bit of pineapple pulled from his daiquiri, “but I think everyone just gets confused with the whole USO travelling showgirl thing. Just because he put on tights and foundation to punch out Adolf Hitler twice a night for four months, everyone thinks he’s, I dunno, into that.”

“You're talking about the 90lb guy who was ‘ _into’_ Peggy Carter?”

“No, no, no,” argues James, “that doesn’t mean anything. Also, she was really, uh, into? Yeah, okay, that’s explicit enough. Into him. Really, really into him. It was like I didn’t exist when they were around each other.”

“That’s not conclusive, but I think on balance of probability it might make her the kinky one?”

“I tell you this, Pepper, Peggy, in the War? Any one of us would be so lucky. Believe me.” 

Pepper, if asked, would describe his expression as respectful yet reminiscently horny, and spares a moment to appreciate how that’s something she can discern from someone previously so withdrawn.

“I defer to the expertise of James Buchanan Barnes, of course,” she says, raising both hands in surrender.

“You should, I hear that guy knows his shit,” agrees James.

“And what is he into?” asks Pepper.

Bucky looks briefly evasive.

“Ah, I see. _You're_ the kinky one,” Pepper crows, before he can respond, clapping her hands together.

“How is it okay to talk about this?” groans Bucky. “How are dames, folks, everyone and their mother, just completely fine with talking about this out loud in public?”

“Decline of Western society,” says Pepper, conclusively. “Personally, I’m for it.”

They clink their glasses together.

“Also,” says James, earnestly, “Steve is not straight laced. Steve is a stubborn, sarcastic, ornery bastard and I hope one day you get to see it. He’s _awful_. _”_

“But you love him,” Pepper tells him.

“But I do, God help me,” agrees James. “Dance with me?” he offers, standing and holding out his flesh hand. “Steve never dances with me. I don’t see why I shouldn’t get to dance just because Steve Rogers has two left feet and can’t see what’s in front of him.”

Pepper doesn’t see why not either, but it’s still _sad._

“Oh James,” she sighs. “Well. _We_ shall dance, Tony says he can dance but he really, really can't. Not anywhere near enough to dance with an actual other person. Not proper dancing. And I’m told you have a historical reputation to uphold, so lead on.”

“I’ll try my best to live up to the advertising,” says James, gravely, and takes her by the hand.

The man at the table over the way is really bad at hiding his curiosity. Pepper lets him gawk. She’s about to be slung around the dance floor by a man with a metal arm and superhuman stamina, if he wants to stare, he’s going to get a show. 

By the time the music has changed from a tasteful swing number to mid-2010s pop hits, and she and James are yelling the lyrics to Walk the Moons’ ‘shut up and dance’ into each others’ faces, Pepper’s forgotten all about it.

  
  



	6. Chapter 6

The following week, Bucky is not doing well. Pepper stills gets texts though.

_Today is cancelled_ , reads the message on her screen.

_Poor bb. Need anything?_

_Nah, Wilson’s coming over and we’re going to watch hockey or something._

_Gross_.

_So’s my brain_.

_So’s your face._

_Rude._

_Just preparing the ground so you’re ready for Sam. Seriously, if you need anything just ask._

_Promise. Steve says to say hello._

_Hello back. Enjoy your violence on ice._

_Yeah. Thanks Pepper._

_xx_

After a few days of this, things start to look up. Bucky says he’s even showered, which is apparently a win. 

The week after that, things are much better and Pepper asks Bucky to join her in a new bar that’s opened up in Brooklyn. He shows up with great dark circles under his eyes, but also a smile. It’s a good evening, and everything. It’s even a good martini, though the bartender needs to know what “very dirty” means, thinks Pepper, as she stares despondently at the now-empty cocktail stick. 

“You want more olives?” asks Bucky.

“Yes,” says Pepper.

“Shall I have them bring the jar?,” he asks, as he turns to catch the attention of the servers.

“Shut up,” she tells him, which he correctly interprets as meaning, ‘yes please’.

She can’t really blame the alcohol for what happens next. They’re leaning forward across the table to talk over the music, the jar of olives between them. At this point, Pepper’s winkling them out with a whole heap of cocktail sticks that Bucky has been stealing and hiding in her pockets when she’s not looking. She knows he’s doing it and it’s disgusting, but she doesn’t have the heart to stop him.

Bucky’s talking with some authority about espionage. 

“HYDRA never — to my knowledge, and look, there's files, someone's gotta have read them all — never sent me out and was like, this is your mission. Fuck or die.”

“Really?” Pepper sips her drink. She lets her eyes travel up and down and arches her eyebrow. “So much for making best use of their assets.”

“You'd be surprised how little spy craft involves actually seducing people, Pepper,” he explains, earnest in what seems to be a tipsy haze.

“Hollywood has misled me? Oh, I am betrayed!” she gasps, miming a dramatic hand to her forehead.

“Oh yeah,” he says. “It's mostly picking up the laptops or foolscap files these people leave in public restrooms. Or on trains. Or one time in their kid’s ballet studio. It’s just a case of being in the right place at the right time.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously. Well, that and killing troublesome people,” he says off hand. 

The bottom drops out of Pepper’s stomach.

James Barnes pauses with his beer bottle to his lips, horrified. His eyes are as big, shiny and white as silver dollars.

Pepper feels cold. Then hot. The internationally feared former assassin sitting across from her gradually lowers his drink to the table. 

No one is breathing.

James breaks the silence first, almost babbling.

“Shit, wait sorry, we were talking, I didn't think. Shit.” He drops his head into his hands and starts to hyperventilate. “I’m sorry. I’ll go.”

“No, James…”

“I should go…”

“It's, it's alright. I invited this, didn't I?” Pepper rests her temples between her clenched fists, elbows on the table, looking at the perfect table top. She tries not to heave.

They look at each other. 

_Oh god_ , thinks Pepper.

===

Bucky can't believe his stupid mouth. Also that he was complacent enough to forget this, this, sword of fucking Damocles that hangs over his life. And now he’s reminded her of what he’s done and who he is, he can stop pretending this is going to somehow be fine. His ears are full of static.

“I should definitely go,” says Bucky, and his voice sounds rough even to him.

Maybe there's something of the experimental test subject about Pepper Potts still, or perhaps its the CEO thing, or — Bucky doesn’t know — just womanhood or something, because her mouth hardens and she looks like she’s steeling herself.

“No, this is good. This is good. We… It… It's not going to go away, James.” She raises her eyes and looks Bucky in the face. “Is it?”

Talking. To make things better. His least favourite thing. “No,” he croaks.

Pepper holds his gaze and lifts a hand, counting off on her fingers. 

“James. Context. One. That… part of your life wasn't your fault. Two. Agreed, we are not joking about this. Three. Tony is working through this, okay? He was… hurt badly over this. Devastated. Of course. But he'll get there. He… Some part of him… Some part of him knows it wasn’t on you. And James, it’s not. Alright? It’s not. There's this thing, about knowing something intellectually and being able to accept it in your bones? Tony’s not even able to accept it in his head yet, and it'll take some time. But James, I don't blame you for this. I only know _you_. Not what they made you do. And you are a smart, stupid, charming, jackass of a man who deserves love, okay?” 

“Ok?” says Bucky, very small. Pepper taps her finger on his vibranium arm.

“Seriously,” she says. “Even charming jackasses deserve love. I’m almost certainly, probably, marrying Tony Stark…”

Bucky chokes out a laugh. 

“…so I know of which I speak. I can’t… forgive you this. But as far as I’m concerned, there isn’t anything to forgive. They took your mind, James. My god. You deserve everything, you hear me? Everything.” 

Her voice is shaking, by the end of that speech. And she’s clutching his sleeve with both hands. Her polished pink nails are digging into the fabric.

Bucky feels his chest heave once and he lets out a shaky breath. Pepper releases her grip on his shirt and shifts so she’s holding his hands between both of hers. 

“I will not allow you to destroy this friendship because of a past reality that we both knew existed far before we were introduced.” Bucky feels her hands pulse hot where they clasp his own, but it’s there and gone, a brief heat, under control.

All he can do is nod. She lets him breathe, holds his hands, breathes herself, until they both settle.

Pepper leans back first, drains the watery dregs of her cocktail and pulls another olive from the jar. They both laugh nervously, and smile — less nervously, Bucky thinks. They’re gonna be okay. He’s not fucked it up. Unbelievably, they’re both still here. Bucky searches for a while before he finds something to break their silence. 

“So,” he asks. “When you make an honest man of him. Will you go by Ms. Potts? Or Mrs Stark?”

“Oh GOD,” says Pepper, “Mrs Stark? Barnes, wash your mouth out with soap, oh my god. That sounds… Oh my god.” 

She looks like she’s sucking on lemons not olives.

“So that’s a no to taking his surname?”

“I'm going to need to be more drunk for this. You might have to carry me home. Here, I should probably give you Happy's number.” She theatrically fumbles for her phone, and Bucky laughs.

“I mean, I guess it's the twenty-first century, perhaps he's going to go by Mr Potts?” he needles, and she bursts into giggles and holds her hands to her mouth.

“Yes! Yes, let’s do that!” she chortles through her fingers. “I’ll tell him tonight! That’ll go well.”

Bucky takes a deep breath. Then another. He looks into her eyes.

“Howard would have lost his mind at the very thought,” he says quietly, testing the waters. 

Pepper looks fond.

“Hey. Feminism. Maybe he would have been fine with it?”

“Yeah, feminism… Howard Stark… two concepts I imagine went so well together. I’m probably glad I missed most of the sixties and seventies,” he says, looking up at her carefully.

“Oh James,” she says, and Bucky can’t be having with any more sadness. Or talking. Goddamn.

“Wanna dance, milady?” he asks, holding out a hand.

“Fuck, yes,” says Pepper, downing her drink and slamming it on the table.

This, Bucky can do.

After slinging Pepper around the dance floor and making far too much visible spectacle of themselves for two people who prefer to be anonymous, they make their way out to the car, much happier in themselves. 

It’s hardly surprising someone watches them carefully. Everyone is watching them; it stands to reason. Bucky’s paranoid, but he’s trying to get better. He notes it, but parks it for later.

===

Pepper congratulates Bucky and herself for getting through that night, and honestly things are fun. Tony’s still harping on at her to let him broach the subject of what he calls The Greatest Gay Romance of A Generation with Steve Rogers, and Pepper is still insisting he keep a lid on it. Bucky’s said time and again that he’s not going to make the first move, but Pepper thinks she’s wearing him down gradually. She’s also been getting Nat to test the waters with Steve, under the pretence of broadening the scope of her mission to set him up with the women of her acquaintance. 

“Interesting,” Nat had said, and since then Pepper hasn’t heard another word on the subject. Certainly neither Bucky nor Steve has done anything about it, but these things take time. She’s given them until Christmas to sort it out themselves before she gives in to Tony’s badgering. 

A few weeks later still, Nat has passed enough information for Pepper to make a decision on EDGE Corp’s future, and it’s not about to go well for Hank Wallace. 

Nat says being PA to Wallace’s second in command as the most gruelling and thankless position she’s had since she pretended she worked for Tony, if that had also included passive aggression and constant verbal undermining. (“It didn’t?” asked Pepper. “That was diplomacy,” said Nat.) 

The employees Nat — as Natalie — met and befriended had been sympathetic, but quick to suggest she quit while she could, and find somewhere less fucked up. They’d described a culture Pepper thinks seems best characterised as ‘Mummy and Daddy know best’, with bullying from Hank and Linda from the top, and a sub-culture of enabling and silence, and putting up and shutting up from everyone below. American labor laws, or lack thereof, admittedly encourage this kind of leadership and followership in many organisations but a) Pepper likes to think Stark Industries strives to be better than this; b) it’s a shitty way to run a company that’s ostensibly interested in innovation; and c) it puts limits on growth. This makes sense to Pepper. She sees why Wallace has taken the company only this far now and she’s decided he’s certainly not taking it any further. 

Of course, she and her team have to give him the opportunity to express his take on the situation.

It goes about as well as she expected, based on Nat’s feedback.

“These are a few staff trying to create problems, with personal resentments,” says Wallace, gesturing expansively and leaning back in the leather chair in another one of the Tower’s boardrooms.

“There’s a difference between articulating a problem and creating one,” says Pepper.

“Where are you getting this from?” challenges Wallace, shifting his posture, leaning forward aggressively, adjusting his cuffs.

“We looked into exit interviews, and HR records,” Pepper explains. “Everything seems in order and very legal, but I had an odd feeling, and a friend agreed to help me out. Natalie Rushman, your Business Manager's new PA. We can't help but notice there's been a rolling turnover of those at a rate of one every six months? That was one of our red flags.”

Wallace is too professional to openly splutter, but he makes a barely suppressed grunt of anger.

“Linda has been my right hand for over a decade, if she’s leaving, I’m leaving” he growls, which doesn’t exactly suggest he doesn’t know precisely what Pepper means by red flags.

“That is the idea, yes,” confirms Pepper, and it’s astonishing to her, but he doesn’t seem to have been expecting that. He boggles at her. 

“Pardon?”

Apparently denial is a force to be reckoned with. She continues.

“While everything seems in accordance with policy, we can't help but notice that a lot of these employees who left at short notice are Black or Indigenous, older people, have perhaps a faint hint of the rainbow, those that think a little differently, and anyone whose submitted suggestions for alternative approaches to business management. You've tried very well to silence those who seem to have been forced out, and your NDAs hold water, but our investigations note that every colleague you’ve had any interactions with had very similar stories, and water cooler conversations seem mostly to point out that the majority of your staff are in agreement with them.”

“This is ridiculous,” says Wallace.

“Your FIFO ‘fly-in-fly-out’ staffing policy seems to be contributing to feelings of precarity, and this report tells me employees have dubbed it, what was it? Ah yes, _Fit In Or Go Away_ , which, Hayley?” Pepper, turns to her own PA theatrically, “…that doesn't seem to fit the acronym…”

Hayley opens her mouth to reply and play along, and Pepper feigns enlightenment with a finger in the air and a knowing nod before Hayley has to actually say it.

“Oh, no. I see. Well. You get the picture,” she says, turning back to Wallace.

“This is a conspiracy,“ he says. “We have clear policies and commitments to diversity.”

“You do,” she agrees. “You say you’re open to suggestions and there's a no blame culture, but people disappear, these people who question your business model and office culture. I realise that this is very common in many industries and organisations. At Stark Industries, however, we strive to be uncommon. We are trying to learn what it's like to really put people first. EDGE cannot proceed as part of Stark Industries under your leadership,” she tells him.

“I built this business from the ground up,” says Wallace, making his defence. “I pay the mortgages of over two hundred people, and I have kept this company together through two recessions and not once had to cut my complement of staff except to manage the departure of a few bad hats....”

Pepper cocks her head.

“I understand your staff provide you time in exchange for money; it sounds like they pay their own mortgages,” argues Pepper, recognising that if this is getting into labour politics she hasn’t really got a leg to stand on, but something about this man is bypassing the fuse of her patience and applying the taper straight to the charge. She swallows down the heat she feels roiling somewhere in her bones. It’s absolutely not the time for a literal meltdown, she tells her cells, and hopes they listen. 

“Stark Industries has concluded that as EDGE is an energy company, your employees’ energy would be best spent adjusting to a change in leadership, training and practice at transparent collaborative working and a chance to thrive rather than — how did one employee put it? ‘ _Put up and shut up’_.”

“Why would you listen to people who are resentful and take their word over mine?” he asks. “They’re just trying to create problems” he blusters. “I’ve run this company for twenty years.”

“I know. You’ve earned your retirement. We have the NDA here, and a substantial severance package, if you'd like your lawyers to review it before you sign?”

Wallace looks like he’s been fed lemons, but Pepper is firm, and in the end he can’t argue with Pepper or the paperwork. Pepper almost feels sorry for him. 

He’ll take the NDA away for his lawyers to review, of course. He’s fuming visibly.

Pepper takes a moment to catch her breath and cool her jets. Maybe this is how Steve feels about bullies, or how Nat felt when she confronted Alexander Pierce, the exhilaration of playing your hand and leaving it there for all to see. Of giving someone who assumed they held all the power, no way out. It’s a small thing, in comparison with the evils of the world and the existential threats of the galaxy or other quantum dimensions. It feels like the right thing to do, though.

These people — Hank Wallace and Linda Argyle — aren't HYDRA; they're ordinary people trying to do what's best for themselves and their reputations, without thinking of others as people. Just as problems to be removed. So, yes, a small thing in a world of bigger wrongs, but Pepper hopes the change of leadership will be good for business as well as for the remaining employees. She'll call in some candidates, maybe interview some of the existing staff, do a full review. 

Wallace is still spluttering as Pepper leaves; he probably hasn’t processed it yet. Endings are hard to accept when you’re used to being able to talk your way out of them. There will be money in it for him, of course. A golden parachute, which Pepper’s always thought sounded very impractical. 

He’s still an intimidating physical presence. He shakes her hand as she stands to leave, grasping hard. 

Pepper reminds herself that if she wanted, she could crush his hand. She suppresses a shiver, waits for him to be out of sight before she wipes that hand on her skirt.

EDGE Corp is moving on without Hank Wallace, and Pepper wishes them well. She also really owes Nat a consulting fee, a favour and a crate of vodka. 

It’s a load off Pepper’s mind, or it should be. Alone, and back in her office, she lets herself shudder and decides to give herself the rest of the day off.

  
  



	7. Chapter 7

EDGE Corp is a load off Pepper’s mind for only two days and change, when she’s approached by a couple as she’s taking a lunchtime stroll in the park. They’re good, or they would have been headed off at the pass by the very discreet security presence she employs to prevent _precisely this eventuality_. As it is, a middle aged couple who’d been strolling past, holding hands and seemingly absorbed in each other, melt out of the crowd and accost Pepper as she’s taking a flaky bite of her croissant. They sweep her up in a pincer movement and steer her through the mass of tourists, each taking an elbow. Pepper swallows hastily.

“A word, Ms. Potts,” says the man, “while we walk, if you please.”

“I don’t please, I don’t at all please,” objects Pepper, startled. “What do you want?” She really wishes her voice wouldn’t go so squeaky in this kind of situation. 

“It’s not what we want, it’s what you want,” says the woman. “And you, Ms. Potts, want Hank Wallace to remain in charge of Stark Industries’ new acquisition.”

“ _Do_ I?” returns Pepper, with some asperity, tugging herself away from their grasps.

Pepper draws herself up, brushes a stray wisp of pasty from the corner of her mouth with all the dignity she can muster.

The couple — of toughs, if not a couple in romantic actuality — link hands again, ‘no threat here’, says their body language. Their body language is lying. Their faces radiate aggression. Pepper thinks she’s seen a thousand women like this one. She’d be imagining her a mother of three, the sort of person who bakes quiche and brings her husband lemonade while he mows the lawn in the front yard. Except her eyes; those are mean. 

“Think of it as a condition of your continued domestic peace and successful career,” says the man. He’s similarly unremarkable looking, if slightly more put-together. Part of Pepper’s brain registers that his hair, with its rows of short twists, looks nice, and that it deserves to belong to a man with a much less icy expression. Apart from their faces, and their obvious agenda, they look very, very ordinary.

“A condition of what?” asks Pepper. Where the hell is that bodyguard?

“Your relationship, your career, and their wellbeing,” says the man.

“Change your mind about Hank Wallace, or Stark will hear all about your boy toy," says the woman. 

“My… boy toy?” Pepper repeats, faintly. What on earth?

"Yeah, the man-bun," says the man.

Pepper turns to look him in the eyes. He’s serious. She gapes at them both for a moment, before realising she’s catching flies and closes her mouth. "My… boy toy?” Do they mean James Barnes? “I — really? I mean, that's flattering, no, it is, but…” Have they seen them together around town? This is extraordinary. And unbelievably overconfident, if this is coming from Wallace. She shakes herself, mentally. “You know what, let's just stick with boy toy. You’ll tell Tony?”

“Yeah,” says the woman. “And not to spell it out, but you’re only CEO at Stark because of him, so what’s your career going to look like if he discovers you’ve got someone on the side? Think on that. Make good choices.”

 _‘Wow_ ’, thinks a distant part of Pepper’s thoughts.

“I see…” says Pepper, and it comes out sounding decidedly strangled in her throat. She doesn’t know whether to laugh or spit in their faces. Not even her built-in heat-generating defence mechanism has kicked in. She’s just… She doesn’t know what she is. Also, seriously, where is her security detail?

“Instruct your lawyers, bring Wallace back, do it by the end of tomorrow. Or Stark gets photos, details, dates, the works. You’ve been warned,” says the woman. And then they both drift off back into the passing crowds, and Pepper is left standing alone with her mouth open again. 

It’s just an ordinary day, and Pepper is alone.

“What just happened?” she asks herself, bewildered.

Her bodyguard, who’s presumably finally noticed she’s not just passing the time of day with a pair of tourists, jogs up far, far too late. Pepper takes a few minutes to both reassure and chastise him. His name’s Michael, and he’s very apologetic when he learns what has happened. He also calls his boss, who calls _his_ boss, and Happy Hogan arrives shortly afterwards, sweating and dishevelled and thoroughly pissed. Pepper feels sorry for poor Michael but Happy’s clearly enjoying having someone to yell at, and it transpires he’s also called in reinforcements, though Pepper’s sure by this point there’s no harm done, and nothing to be gleaned from the midday throng of humanity in Central Park.

She’s finishing off her croissant, when there’s a gust of wind, and a loud thump, and Sam Wilson lands at her side. Pepper nearly aspirates crumbs.

“Lost them,” curses Sam, brushing dust from his kevlar armoured sleeves. “I’m so sorry, Pepper, Happy says they threatened you, did you get anything about what they want?”

Pepper can’t help it, she laughs. It bubbles up from her chest, displacing the heat, and the confusion, and the sheer nonsense that has been the last half hour. Sam just waits it out, wearing an expression of mildly amused concern. When she can catch her breath, Pepper explains: the merger, the talks, Nat’s investigations, the micro and macro-aggressions, her decision to cut Wallace loose with some money and no sympathy, just as he’d done to anyone who challenged him in the past. Sam listens, his eyebrows getting progressively higher and higher up his forehead.

“I’m hardly able to believe they thought that would work, even if it was a justified threat,” concludes Pepper. “That man must have adamantium balls to even consider it…”

Sam’s eyebrow levitates nearly to space and his eyes bulge. He snorts.

“… Pardon the language,” says Pepper. “But _really_. What did they think would happen? I’d go, ‘oh no, I must stay in my sugar daddy’s good books to keep my career, I will bend to any demand, I am so frightened, I will just roll over and do whatever it takes, oh please don’t tell Mr. Stark about my illicit affair, it will ruin me, I won’t tell anyone, I won’t tell a soul, I’ll give Wallace back his job and never say a word.’ What utter…” Pepper runs out of words. She shrugs helplessly, giving Sam a wide eyed look.

“Yeah, I hear you,” says Sam. “I can’t believe that would have worked on anyone, unless this Wallace fool really thinks you’re some helpless air-head tied to Tony like a balloon on string.” They share another look. What else is there to say?

“Well, it’s nice to know what people really think of you,” says Pepper, eventually, still reckoning with her disbelief. She can’t believe the _nerve_.

“Not people, Pepper, fools. Big-ass, head in the sand, whole fools. No one sees you like that.”

“Apparently someone does,” she says, surprising herself with the bitterness she hears in her own voice.

“Then that person can’t see, ‘cause that person has their head so far up their backside their eyes are trapped in their oesophagus, and they’re coughing up their cheap toupee,” Sam assures her. “Because they sure as fuck aren’t looking at what I’m looking at.”

Pepper snorts. “Thanks, Sam, that’s reassuring.” Sam gives her a gap-toothed grin.

Pepper’s phone rings as they stand there; Michael the guard, looking flushed and sheepish, Happy striding around the scene waving his arms and talking on his own cell, Sam Wilson standing with his arms folded, looking like the personification of the American hero, if your idea of the American hero had wings.

Pepper digs into her purse and extracts her phone, Tony’s least obnoxious selfie grins at her from the lock screen.

“Pepper,” he says, when she answers.

“Tony. I don’t know what Happy’s told you, but it’s all okay.”

“He said someone threatened you. Who do I have to get Romanov to kill?”

“I don’t counsel killing anyone right now, Tony. But it’s weird. I was blackmailed, I think? They said if I didn’t do what they asked, they’d send you all the sordid details of my affair with my — their words, Tony — boy toy.”

“Boy toy? Have you been holding out on me? Don’t tell me you’ve been holding out on me, I’m sure you haven’t the time for an affair, and if you do I’d better up my game. No, no, the only person you’ve been regularly seeing between me and your fine, fine corporate responsibilities is…” He tails off into eventual silence, as Pepper presumes his brain catches up with his mouth.

“No,” says Tony.

“Yes,” says Pepper.

“Barnes? They think you’re cheating on me with a Howling Commando?”

“Yes,” says Pepper, rolling her eyes to the sky, “whoever would think such a thing?”

Tony has absolutely no shame and — life-altering seismic shifts notwithstanding — no regrets either. “Fools,” he suggests. “Nincompoops, shit-for-brains, more fools, and sometimes deeply flawed but otherwise loveable people?”

“Yes, Tony. Although these were the ‘hired to deliver the message from the fools,’ kind of people.”

“How stupid, how crashingly overconfident, how full to the back teeth with gold-plated hubris would someone have to be to think that would get you to… What did they want you to do, by the way? And for whom? And was it Justin Hammer?” 

Pepper giggles. “Reinstate Hank Wallace at EDGE Corp,” says Pepper. “And I’m assuming it was not Justin.”

Tony’s response, once he’s stopped laughing, is an unrepeatably crass assessment of Wallace’s intelligence and character. 

“Yes,” says Pepper, happily. “That’s what I thought.”

===

Bucky is summoned that evening to the penthouse apartment, home of Pepper and Tony, alone — without Steve. He bids his best friend, and secret love of his life, farewell as he leaves their apartment, trying not to feel like this might be goodbye or something stupid like that. Steve, as usual, is oblivious.

Bucky ascends the elevator with trepidation.

He’s not denying he’s nervous; he’s not really seen Tony since Stark’s Scarlet Pimpernel act at Pepper’s party that time, and he’s not spoken to him directly since they were all beating seven kinds of shit out of each other in the frozen ass-end of nowhere the previous year. Stark’s messages of welcome and assurances that he, Bucky, was to make himself at home in the tower apartment had been relayed when Bucky moved back from Wakanda and into Stark Tower — sorry, _Avengers’ Tower_ — but nothing had been said between them in person. Setting foot in the man’s private space feels like an imposition too far, though Pepper assures Bucky that for some reason Tony Stark is much more kindly disposed towards him these days. 

Bucky’s sure he can believe her. Probably. What reason would she have to lie? Sparing his feelings? Maybe, but unlikely. They _talk_ about their feelings, him and Pepper, all the time now. Bucky almost likes it. Sometimes. The alcohol definitely helps.

Bucky takes a few slow breaths in the elevator, trying to let the fuzzy feeling in his head and the tightness in his chest recede on its own without resorting to emergency pills or something. By the time he steps off into the vestibule and approaches the Stark front door — for guests, that is, he’s sure they have another direct elevator Stark and Pepper use themselves — Bucky is feeling a bit less scattered and much more calm.

Pepper greets him at the door, handing him a bottle of something cold and european. He squints at the label. It’s alcoholic, that’s all he really cares about. He smiles awkwardly at Pepper and takes a pre-emptive swig. It’s mildly fizzy and has flavour. Good enough.

Pepper links their arms and leads him gently down the wide corridor and into an open living space that is, Bucky thinks, surprisingly tasteful for someone named Stark. He looks around, hoping it comes across as less ‘threat assessment’ and more ‘oh I love what you’ve done with the place.’ He braces himself as Tony Stark levers himself out of a fat leather sofa and approaches, hand extended.

Bucky can feel himself frowning, but he extends his right hand anyway, and takes hold of Tony’s. Tony doesn’t even flinch, he’s grinning even, as he pumps Bucky’s hand up and down a perfectly socially appropriate number of times before stepping back. Of course, he’s a Stark so he’s also _talking_.

“Come in,” he’s saying with what seems like genuine enthusiasm. “Park yourself on a sofa, cyberman, and show me that frankly astonishing example of African Futurism attached to your left shoulder.”

“Tony,” scolds Pepper. “Leave the man’s limbs alone. And is it futurism, if Princess Shuri made it last year?”

“Yes, right, yes, sorry. To both you and the Kingdom of Wakanda.” Tony looks up at Bucky, sharp brown eyes that miss nothing they’re prepared to see. Bucky steels himself to look back. Tony does nothing but quirk an eyebrow, before taking a step back. “My apologies, Pepper has opinions about people being treated as objects of study. Which she is very much entitled to, as are you, say no more.”

Bucky hasn’t actually said anything yet, and tells Tony so. Tony giggles. Bucky boggles.

“Yes, alright, I’m told I have a tendency to monopolise the conversation,” says Tony. Bucky just looks at him. Pepper is shaking her head while she pours herself something from an expensive looking bottle. She’s facing away from them, so he can’t see her face, but he imagines she’s rolling her eyes. Tony continues, “Though, if you did want to, you know, turn up in the lab, let me have a look at what you’ve got there…” he gestures to Bucky’s left side, and trails off.

“I thought the Princess sent you the specifications,” says Bucky. “She told me she did, just in case it needed maintenance and she wasn’t available to fly in and do it herself. Being a princess, and all. And busy in Oakland when she’s not busy in Wakanda.”

“You bet she did, and I’m grateful mind you, and mind her Highness, but Barnes, I barely understand it. Me! God Save the Princess, and god help anyone who gets on her bad side.”

“I’ll drink to that,” says Pepper, raising a glass of something with more refined bubbles than Bucky’s bottle of lager. “Though I don’t think they have the, what-do-you-call-it, ‘God Save’ thing going on in quite the same way.” 

“She did tell me America’s god was a colonizer,” agrees Tony. “I told her I was an atheist, she told me that was just the same thing in a different crappy outfit, and then she gave my nano-suit some upgrades I’m still taking apart to understand, so, here’s to the royal teenager. Long may she reign.”

Tony knocks his whisky tumbler against Pepper’s champagne flute, then reaches out to Bucky. Bucky, feeling he’s stepped into an alternate universe, reaches back and achieves a resulting clinking noise. They all toast.

“She’s the best of us,” says Bucky, with every sincerity. 

“I’m glad she took you on,” said Tony, in the same tone. Bucky finally snaps.

“Okay, forgive my bluntness, but this is becoming weird. What’s going on?”

Pepper huffs in apparent amusement, and Tony gives Bucky the once over with those eyes that make Bucky feel like Stark can see through him to all the moving parts.

“Alright, first things first. You and I? We’re still weird. You’re alright, Barnes, and Pepper assures me that, were I to harbour feelings of good will towards you, on occasion, they would not be misplaced. But. We both know the stuff we’re not talking about, and we’re not talking about it. It’s there, I’m not over it, I likely never will be over it, and this is as far as I go when it comes to referencing this in any way. Got it?”

Bucky swallows. He can feel the bottle of lager getting warm and sweaty in his hand. He nods, once.

“Right,” says Tony. “Pepper has a story for you. Sit down. Listen to our tale of woe.”

They sit, and Pepper tells him all about her afternoon, which involves what has to be the most blatant, inept and entitled blackmail attempt Bucky’s ever heard of. And he says as much. That’s not even starting on the bit where someone has been _watching_ him and Pepper, and drawn some frankly risible conclusions. Bucky’s annoyed. He knew people were looking, he didn’t know they were taking fucking minutes. Maybe he’s losing his touch. 

“I’m starting to think he might actually be a narcissist,” says Pepper, of Wallace. Presumably.

“Hey,” says Stark, “I’m right here.”

Pepper sighs. “You’re not a narcissist, Tony,” she says. “Not like, pathologically. Narcissists can’t admit they could be wrong, they can’t acknowledge there might be more than one way of doing things, they see difference as a problem to be excised, and they see other people as a means to massage their own fragile identity, nothing else.”

“Um,” says Tony. Pepper shushes him.

“A narcissist would have looked at Yinsen and seen a loser and a wimp,” says Pepper. Bucky can hear Stark’s sharp indrawn breath. “A narcissist would have seen weakness and despised him. You are self-centred, but you have compassion, Tony. So much compassion.”

“Alright, that’s enough,” says Bucky, before Tony can either butt in, cry, or jump from the window and fly off in embarrassment. That might be Bucky projecting; from what he’s seen so far Stark might actually be incapable of embarrassment, whatever Pepper says. “We get it. This fellow Wallace is an over-confident prick who thinks the world exists to serve his will, and he’s so keen to hang onto his job, he thinks you’ll be the same, and he thinks you and I are…”

“Fucking,” says Pepper, helpfully. Bucky closes his eyes in pain. He _knew_ this evening was going to be a terrible idea.

“ _Pepper_ ,” gasps Tony Stark, sounding giddy with glee. 

“Yes, thank you,” says Bucky. “The thing is, why are you telling me and not allowing me to live in blissful ignorance?”

“Revenge,” says Tony. Pepper smacks him on the thigh. 

“Situational awareness,” says Pepper, a phrase she learned from Bucky only a few weeks ago. “If — when — we go out and socialise, you need to know there might be a threat. I hate to say it, but does that offer to act as a personal security guard still stand? Happy’s… well, he’s not. With my current detail.”

“Yeah,” says Bucky faintly. “I can imagine.”

They drink, and agree on a protocol, and a schedule when Bucky will be available to escort Pepper where she needs to go. Tony offers to give her a suit. Pepper points out that she can repel bullets, if she wants to. Tony points out she has to be concentrating to do it, and that doesn’t help her when it comes to stealth attacks. Pepper points out that if Wallace wanted to hire a sniper, a suit would hardly help unless she wore it _all the time_ , and Tony’s reaction to the word sniper is something Bucky isn’t going to stick around for, so that’s when he excuses himself with a series of ‘oh my, is that the time, I must be getting on, yes we’ll be in touch, you know where I live, so nice to see you both’ noises and, as he gets into the elevator, a sigh of heartfelt relief.

When he gets back, Steve is sitting at the kitchen island with a chamomile tea and a book.

“Buck! Was it okay?” he asks, standing and making his way to Bucky’s side. He looks as if he might want to check for injuries, but can’t quite dare. Bucky pokes him in the chest until Steve backs up towards the sofas. 

“You cannot believe how much it fucking wasn’t, Rogers,” he says. “Sit your ass down and let me tell you the most ridiculous thing I’ve heard this century.” He’s smiling though, and Steve picks up on that. Steve smiles back, so very fondly, Bucky thinks his chest is being squeezed again. He sighs, throws an arm around Steve and drags him to the sofa. “I’ve been offered a security job. And I’ve got a new and sordid reputation. You’ll like this…”

  
  



	8. Chapter 8

Against everyone’s expectations — and Pepper has absolutely been watching for trouble — EDGE Corp transitions over to Stark Industries ownership without a further hitch. Pepper hasn’t needed to be in the same room with either Hank Wallace, Linda Argyle, or any of their lawyers and she hears not a word about that hamfisted attempt to threaten her. In fact Wallace signs the papers without comment although, according to Pepper’s people, without any grace either. That’s okay. She doesn’t need his good will, just his signature. 

Wallace departs, taking a tiny handful of loyal staff, including Linda, with him. Pepper replaces him with an external hire she’s brought in to successfully fix situations like this before. Letitia ‘Letty’ Johnson is a woman with patience, compassion, the rooted self-confidence of a mighty California Redwood, and a pragmatic streak wider than the Hudson. Pepper thinks EDGE will do very well with Letty. Natasha hangs up her corporate persona along with her business suit and returns to whatever she does in the usual course of things, and the whole blackmail nonsense gets more or less forgotten. For a while, it feels a bit like Pepper’s waiting for the other shoe to drop, but weeks go by without incident, so when something finally does happen, it’s actually kind of a surprise.

Pepper and Bucky are long over the awkward start to their friendship, and they’re having a late supper at a small and low-key hole-in-the-wall steak restaurant in Brooklyn. The room is loud with the sounds of sizzling slabs of cow and the smells of uncomplicated cooking. The worn tables are covered in red and white gingham cloths, and for some unfathomable reason the green walls are decorated with photographs and paintings of Frida Kahlo, and Frida Kahlo alone. Pepper’s ‘steak’ is mostly salad, but entirely delicious, and Bucky’s noisily discovering the decadent joys of sweet potato fries. Pepper’s grilling Bucky about his concealed weapons, and, when he refuses to be drawn, speculating wildly about where he might be hiding them. They’ve established he has knives. In his hair. Pepper still thinks he’s holding out on her.

"This is a restaurant. I didn't bring a gun," he hisses, low, over the table. "Where, exactly, in these pants would I be keeping a firearm?"

"Well I don't know, I assumed you had at least an ankle holster or something."

James rolls his eyes.

"You do!” laughs Pepper. “You do have an ankle holster, you lying liar, James Barnes."

“I do not.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“That’s your prerogative, Ms. Potts,” he tells her, and shoves an enormous mouthful of steak into his mouth, chewing obnoxiously. 

“Be smug and silent, see if I care,” she tells him. Pepper’s body is disputing the wisdom of the decanter of water she’s imbibed while waiting for their food. “I’m going to powder my nose, be right back.”

“Do I need to escort you?” James asks, after swallowing down his steak, scanning the restaurant for potential threats. 

At the next table, a family with a baby are visibly attempting to have a nice evening out. There’s a young couple in the corner engaged in what Pepper assesses to be a sweetly awkward first date. One of the girls has left her hand turned palm up on the table, and out of the corner of her eye Pepper sees the other girl blush wildly before interlacing their fingers. No one in the room looks like an undercover agent.

“To the bathroom?” asks Pepper. “I think not. I won’t be long. Send a search party if I don’t return, tell Tony I love him.” She smiles, and then they both flinch as a plastic spoon sails past them, trailing something mashed and orange. 

Pepper can feel her heart hammering, and see Bucky try to recover his breathing, only to turn and be greeted by a happy baby crying ‘ba ba!’ and two mortified looking parents. One retrieves the spoon, while the other apologises profusely to the very obviously startled Bucky and Pepper. Pepper breathes carefully, and she and Bucky graciously accept the apology. Bucky even waggles the fingers of his non-metal hand at the baby, who produces the kind of happy bubbling sound that only comes from someone very small and very young indeed.

Threat assessed and dismissed, they both turn back to each other. 

“Don’t even joke about that, Pepper,” Bucky says, wide eyed.

“Alright, but look, it’s just over there. I’ll be right back.” James Barnes grunts at her, and brushes her off with a flap of the hand. 

“Fine, there’s a back entrance past the kitchen, watch yourself.”

Pepper swipes a sweet potato fry on the way past, waves to the baby, and heads to the restrooms.

===

Bucky doesn’t really have a handle on what women do in restrooms, other than the obvious biological imperatives, so he’s finished his almost unbelievably decadent fries and is sucking salt from his fingers by the time he wonders where Pepper’s got to. 

He’d done cursory recon before their meal; there really is a way out past the kitchen, into a grubby Brooklyn alley that a young Steve Rogers would probably — had probably, for all Bucky’s patchy memory serves — have gotten beat up in. He’d not clocked anyone following them here, though Happy had dropped them off at the door before leaving them to it and driving away.

A feeling of dread grips his chest. He needs, viscerally, to know where Pepper is. He drops a handful of notes on the table from the wallet in his back pocket, and shoves away from the table. 

A few strides take him to the narrow corridor, kitchen on the right, restrooms on the left, exit out of sight along a bend in the passage beyond.

He hangs around outside the door marked ‘Ladies’ for a moment or two, in agonised indecision, when the mother of the baby with the impressive overarm throw arrives and hovers behind him. The baby is on her hip and there’s a familiar and inevitable smell hanging in the air. The baby screws its face up at him.

“Excuse me,” says the mother, indicating the door. 

“Right. Yes. Uh,” Bucky is itching to barge his way in there to find Pepper and assuage this gnawing concern he’s got champing away at his guts. That is not what a normal person would do, though, so he uses his words.

“Ma’am, my friend is in there, and she’s… um… she gets sick sometimes,” he improvises. “Could you see if she’s okay?”

“Of course,” says the lady, shouldering her way into the restroom. She holds the door open with the hip not occupied with a baby, “what’s her name?”

“Pepper,” says Bucky. The woman gives him a knowing look; Pepper’s pretty recognisable and the name’s not exactly common.

“Pepper?” calls the woman. “Hello? Your friend is concerned, is everything alright?”

There’s no answer, and Bucky watches her step further into the room, with its row of sinks and stalls, and a fold-out table on the far wall. 

“There’s no one in here,” says the mother.

Politeness goes out the tiny, grilled window with Bucky’s last shred of patience and he barges in to scan the room, searches each stall, and finally stands in the middle of the floor casting about himself as if Pepper is just hiding behind the fancy air-blowing hand dryer thing, or under a sink. He can see his reflection in the mirrors over the taps; bulging eyes, wild panic. _Oh no, oh no, no, no._

He catches sight of something in the mirror, and looks at the floor. On the tiles are some scattered pieces of wood.

“Cocktail sticks?” asks the mother, who’s standing against the far wall with her child clutched to her chest. Bucky doesn’t blame her; Pepper is gone, presumably taken, and when he finds who did this they damn well better be afraid too.

It takes everything Bucky has within him not to plant a fist into the nearest wall.

“God-fucking-damn it,” Bucky growls, and leaps for the corridor. 

The alley is empty when he bursts from the fire exit, except for the usual sorts of alley detritus, stinking garbage bags, and the crushed remains of Pepper’s phone on the ground. There’s no sign of a vehicle in the streets, and the evening sun is well on its way to the horizon, already far below the roofs of the old buildings. It’s getting dark, and Bucky has lost Pepper, has no leads, and no clue.

Bucky curses the air blue in frustration and self-recrimination, and scrabbles for his own phone.

“Stark,” he says, when Tony picks up. “Someone has Pepper.”

“What the hell do you mean, ‘someone has Pepper’?” barks Tony. Bucky hears a crashing sound in the background.

Bucky takes a deep breath.

“Barnes, I will kill you, what happened?” snaps Stark, before Bucky has a chance to respond.

Bucky is in report mode.

“We were at a restaurant. She went to powder her nose. She was gone about ten minutes, I went to search the restrooms. I found cocktail sticks.”

“Cocktail sticks?”

“Olives.”

“Right. Why the fuck are you not in pursuit?”

“Her phone is broken in the alley, there’s no sign of a struggle, or a vehicle, she could be anywhere, Stark,” he says, and that’s when it sinks in, that Pepper is gone, without warning, without clue, without a trail to follow, and it’s his fault, and then his throat is closing and he’s gasping for breath. He’s got just enough of his wits about him enough to think, _get it together, Barnes_ , and to concentrate. _Calm_ , he thinks. _Calm_. 

It must only be a few moments, but he comes back to himself with Tony Stark shouting down the phone. 

It’s an unpleasant conversation and Bucky is awash with shame before the end of it. Stark, of course, has near limitless resources and can fly. Bucky is stuck in Brooklyn with no leads and no clue what to do next. “Barnes?” snaps Tony, just before he hangs up. “Stay there.”

Well. Fuck that.

Bucky jams his phone back in a pocket and checks the knives in his hair and jacket, the miniature pistol in his ankle holster — well done, Pepper — and the handful of electrical gadgets Romanov had given him, ‘for emergencies’.

Behind him, the mother of the now fretful, weeping baby is standing in the doorway looking at Bucky with huge, brown eyes.

“Do I need to call the police?” she asks, surprisingly calmly. Bucky can feel what must be one hell of a foul expression on his face, but he was brought up right. 

“Not necessary, ma’am,” he tells her. She hoists her wriggling child further up into the safety of her arms and gives Bucky a narrow look.

“You going to find her?” she asks, emphasis on the first word, and in that moment Bucky thinks she must know _exactly_ who he is and what she’s asking.

“Yes I am,” he promises.

“Good,” she says, hoarsely but firmly.

They’re both interrupted by the sounds of shouting from the street. The woman goes pale and darts out a spare hand to clutch his jacket. 

“That’s my husband!” she says.

Bucky hurls himself to the end of the alley and dashes around the corner, mother and wailing child close behind him. They race onto the sidewalk to see the father of the now screaming baby tussling with a man in the gutter outside the restaurant, and one of the teen girls he’d noticed in a booth recording the scene on her phone. The other teen dashes out from the front door yelling, “there was no one back there!” before catching sight of Bucky and pointing.

“Help him, Mister!” says the one with the phone, gesturing to the wrestling men in the gutter. 

Bucky has no idea what’s going on, but he wades in anyway and hauls the two men apart. He keeps a firm, left-handed grip on the one he doesn’t recognise from the restaurant. 

“What is this?” Bucky demands. His new friend from the restroom dashes up to her husband, who pulls her and the baby close to his side. The other party to the brawl is fighting to get free and yelling curses to the street. Bucky tightens his metal grip on the man’s collar and shakes, hard. “Quit it,” he snaps, and the man sags. The girl on the sidewalk is still recording, her girlfriend peering out from behind her.

The husband and father, who Bucky notices has a buzz-cut as well as a practical wife, stands to attention and, improbably, salutes. Bucky feels his eyebrows do something complicated.

“Sir! Corporal Matthew Bright, 6th Field Artillery Regiment,” says the short, stocky, soldier and father. “I saw this man step out of a vehicle, take up station in the doorway over the way and pull a gun.” Bucky does notice, now, that there’s a Glock still spinning on the sidewalk. The corporal is still talking. “I heard the commotion out back, saw him head round to the side. Stopped him, Sir.”

The fellow Bucky’s restraining starts making a fuss again. Bucky slings him around, slams him down on the hood of the nearest car and holds him there with both hands. “You’re going to tell me everything you know, right now,” Bucky grates out, in the deadest, most robotic voice he can muster. Bucky reckons he can make this guy piss himself in under three minutes. Two, if someone passes him that Glock. Which, he’s assuming, was supposed to be his, James Buchanan Barnes’, own murder weapon. Fuck _that._ Bucky lets himself squeeze a little harder. The man whimpers under his hands. 

“Bright,” says Bucky to the corporal, not taking his eyes off the shivering, struggling piece of shit he’s got pinned down. “If you know who I am, then you know it’s not ‘Sir’ and never was so you can stop _fucking_ saluting — sorry ladies,” he says, remembering his audience. The girls are still recording, and there’s quite a crowd gathering. Bucky needs to get out of here and after Pepper right the fuck now.

Bright deflates a little. 

“Matty,” says his wife, cutting in. “This is, pardon me if I’m assuming here, Bucky Barnes, and his friend Pepper has just been kidnapped. He’s gonna need to follow that vehicle you mentioned, I reckon. And one of us needs to change David’s diaper.”

“Yeah, Alicia, I know who he is,” says Corporal Bright gently, squeezing his arm back around his wife briefly before taking the baby. “Sergeant Barnes, my wife, Alicia, and my son David. I didn’t get plates, but it was a navy blue van, it went,” he releases an arm, “thattaway.”

“Thank you, corporal, Alicia. Give me two minutes and you can change this guy’s diaper too,” says Bucky, baring his teeth at his captive who’s cursing up a storm and trying to kick Bucky in the balls. “Who took her, where, and why. Now,” he growls, at the person who’s about to extremely regret getting out of bed this morning. 

“Fuck you,” spits the guy. 

Bucky lets go with his left hand and spins the man around again with his right, before crushing the bastard’s head to the car hood in a firm, metallic grip. He squeezes, ever so slightly, taking care not to burst the guy’s skull too soon. The guy pisses himself. 

Two minutes. Bucky knew it.

Less than a minute later, the guy’s babbling away while the kids from the restaurant are still videoing the scene, Bucky has a location in the Navy Yard, although no clue about who hired this idiot to take Pepper and kill Bucky. He pockets the abandoned Glock, calls Stark, tells him to send out a search — the docks have only got bigger since Bucky was hauling crates in the 1930s — and leaves the urine-soaked miscreant in the capable hands of the burly Corporal Bright. Alicia waves him off with good wishes, before heading in to presumably deal with the other bodily fluids she’s used to handling. 

“Navy Yard’s that way, Si… uh, Sergeant,” says Bright. “We don’t have a car, or we’d let you have our ride…”

“It’s just Barnes, Bright,” says Bucky. “Thanks.”

Bucky gets the two girls to stop their recording. Then he hot-wires someone’s motorcycle in front of half of Brooklyn, abandons the Brights to deal with the fallout, and leaves burning rubber on the road as he heads to the dockyards.

  
  



	9. Chapter 9

Pepper awakens in what looks and smells like a warehouse, handcuffed by her wrists to a hard chair. At first she’s too dazed to be afraid, and then she’s too annoyed. She remembers a sharp jab to the neck as she’d left the ladies room at the restaurant, and nothing else. _I joked about this_ , she thinks, through the fog in her head. _I should have had Bucky escort me to the door. Oh well. You’d think I’d learn. But no._

She’s dimly aware that a group of five, six, eight men — that she can see — are milling around. There are shipping containers stacked around them, the doors to one of them stand wide open. Pepper doesn’t have fond memories of shipping containers. She really needs to leave before anyone notices she’s awake. 

Unfortunately, she hasn’t noticed the men _behind_ her, and one of them must see she’s wriggling about and yells to the others. 

A group of the — kidnappers? Mercenaries? — gather around Pepper’s chair. 

There’s a muffled roar of a motorcycle from outside. Several men jump at the noise.

“Deal with that,” snaps the massive skinhead who seems to be in charge. A couple of the goons peel off and head for a side door. There’s some henchmen admin to be done, apparently, because Pepper’s only approached by the big guy a few minutes later. She wonders if this is a good time to make a break for it, but decides to ask nicely first.

“Let me go now,” says Pepper, flatly. “Leave, let me go, and no one gets hurt.”

“I think you’re in no place to make demands,” says Big Bald Guy. Pepper is not cowed by this. 

“I think you’re reasoning in advance of your data,” she tells him, and concentrates. There’s a pulse of heat, then the smell of a steelworks on a hot day.

Pepper drops the molten remains of the handcuffs to the floor, kicks off her shoes and takes a pace forwards, fists raised and eyes narrowed. She hopes the effect is sufficiently impressive. She wishes she knew how many people she’s up against. Skinhead goes wide-eyed and takes a step back; Pepper’s pretty sure she’s actively glowing now.

“Boss,” says a man in camo gear who hurries up carrying at least three guns that Pepper can see. “Al and Randy haven’t come back.” He looks at Pepper and blanches visibly. “Fuck me,” he curses. _Absolutely the other side of never_ , thinks Pepper.

The boss snorts. “Impressive,” he says, to Pepper. “But there’s fifteen of us, and only one of you. And your fuckbuddy ain’t coming to save you, he’s long bled out in a Brooklyn alley by now. So why don’t you cool down, lady?”

The boss pulls his gun and aims it at Pepper’s forehead. Pepper squeezes her fingers together. _Ohgodohgodohgod_ , she’s thinking, until a second later, over the heads of the men grouped around her, she sees James drop softly from the rafters, snarling. 

His sudden appearance causes panic and Camo Man pulls one of his guns, then yelps as he finds it slapped from his hand by Wakanda's best prosthetic technology. His expression of surprise is wiped away by a flesh fist to the face.

“Oh thank god,” says Pepper. 

The kidnappers swivel between Pepper — glowing from the inside out, very clearly not restrained — and the ghostly avatar of sleet and arctic wind that is Bucky Barnes when he’s truly angry. He scowls and paces like a big cat, slow and deadly. He’s more than six feet of menace, metal and muscle.

He eyes up the man with a gun to Pepper’s head. 

"We're not dating. It's just casual sex," declares Bucky, absolutely deadpan.

 _"James,"_ gasps Pepper, amused and scandalised, "that's just wrong."

That’s more or less when all hell breaks loose, and Pepper forces the furnace inside her to roaring temperatures, skin toughened and shimmering. 

Bucky is laying into men left, right and centre. Skin head boss man is down, Pepper is trying to fend off about three people. Bucky fights his way over, his face set in that expression Sam Wilson calls ‘the wet kitty cat one.’

“You okay?” he asks, between kicking a man in the knee and shoving one into a girder.

“I’m fine, thanks,” manages Pepper. Someone must come up behind her, because Bucky pulls something from a pocket and throws it. The man behind her goes down in a cloud of sparks.

Pepper squeaks.

“What now?” she asks, backing up towards a row of abandoned hoists or something.

“Hit this,” says Bucky and heaves one of the men at her. 

Pepper’s fists clench and her long acrylics dig into her palms. If nothing else this is going to result in a trip to the manicurist's first thing. The man staggers, but puts up his fists and lunges wildly at Pepper.

She swings and connects with his jaw. 

He staggers but recovers, Pepper casts around to find a weapon that won’t break another nail.

She reaches out, ducks around some kind of old machine, grabs what looks like a suitable beam and pulls. The metal screeches. 

She concentrates, the metal melts, globs dropping around her feet. Make that new shoes too. 

Armed with a metal bar, Pepper swings. The noise as she connects the bar to the man’s knee is disgusting, but he stays down.

Bucky is slicing through some new guards like a man with lethal instincts trying desperately to be non-fatal. Some man gets a lucky stab in, and the wide shocked eyes on both of them turns to a growl as Bucky shoves him to Pepper.

Pepper smiles sweetly and drop-kicks the stabber so hard in the crotch he’s going to be tasting his family jewels in the back of his throat for weeks. The man crashes to the floor, with a noise like air escaping from a party balloon.

She looks up to see a room full of prone men in various states of unconsciousness, and Bucky Barnes looming over the boss, who’s clutching a spreading red wet patch on his sleeve.

“Peace, peace! This isn’t worth this shit!” the fallen man wails.

“Why am I here, asshole?” asks Pepper. “What’s this all about?”

“Hank Wallace…” starts the man.

“That fucker,” breathes Pepper.

Bucky Barnes snorts. “Oh yeah, he took it well, alright.”

“Oh no, Hank didn’t set this up himself,” trills a voice from the shadows. “I did it _for_ him.”

Linda Argyle steps into the illuminated circle where Pepper and Bucky are standing, clutching a gun. In their previous interactions, during the EDGE negotiations, Pepper had noted Linda’s dress sense, tall and put together, studiously professional. This is not the Linda Pepper remembers. She’s dishevelled, with bags under her eyes. She looks, thinks Pepper, beyond sane.

“That was his company — our company — and you, you judgemental, self-righteous bitch, took everything away. How could you do that to me?” asks Linda. She looks alone, out of her depth, and terrified. She’s still pointing a gun at Pepper, in a wobbling hand.

Pepper honestly can’t answer that, but happily doesn’t have to. Bucky steps forward, disarms Linda and swipes her off her feet and onto the floor with a single, albeit relatively gentle, movement. Linda looks up at him, sprawled at his feet, mouth open in shock.

Pepper makes a hand dusting gesture. “What were you even thinking?” demands Pepper, with pity.

“Fuck you, and fuck your boyfriend,” spits Linda, from the ground. 

That’s when Iron Man, the Falcon and the Black Widow crash through the grubby skylight from the orange glow of an overcast Brooklyn night, and land right in the middle of the warehouse floor. 

A blast from Tony’s hand… rocket… things… narrowly misses Linda’s nose. She squeals; Pepper can smell singed hair. 

“You’re mistaken. _That’s_ my boyfriend,” says Pepper, with some satisfaction. “Hi Tony, glad you could join us.”

“Pepper,” says Tony, and the relief in his voice is restrained, but Pepper can hear it, and see it too, in every line and twitch on his beloved face, revealed as his face-plate slides back. She flings her arms around the neck of the suit and hopes she’s cooled down enough not to melt it.

“What the hell,” say Sam Wilson and Natasha Romanov in tandem. Linda looks up at them from the floor, tears streaming down her dust-stained face.

“Wouldn’t you do anything for revenge on someone who destroyed the ones you love?” she asks, her voice breaking on the last word. 

There’s a more than awkward silence, which Linda doesn’t seem to know what to do with.

“Uhh, sore point,” begins Tony, eventually, when it appears no one else is going to answer. “But, as it turns out, no. No, I wouldn’t. Because it would be a terrible idea. And more people would get hurt.” He’s studiously not looking anyone else in the eye. 

Pepper breathes a little sigh. She can hear a quick, hitching breath from Bucky’s direction. Natasha’s face is totally blank. Sam looks unimpressed.

“The love of _my_ life would punch you in the face for suggesting it,” says Bucky, conversationally, right in front of the Black Widow, Sam Wilson, Pepper, Tony and God. “Actually he wouldn’t, he’d try to talk about it first, give you the benefit of the doubt. It’s what he does. You’re not talking to him though, you’re here with me.” His voice drops to a growl. “And I hate talking.”

There’s the sound of the warehouse door opening, and sirens as police cars pull up outside. But more to the point, there’s the clang of a falling shield, and a voice from behind them saying, “Buck?”

Bucky turns, and Pepper can see the horror on his face, the whites of his eyes ringing his irises all the way around. 

_Well_ , thinks Pepper, a little loopy, _that’s one way to solve a communication problem._

_===_

Bucky’s brain is white noise, but some part of him watches as Steve staggers to a halt.

“Buck?” he repeats.

 _Oh motherfucking son of a poorly-made gun_ , thinks Bucky. 

Of course that’s when the police catch up to them, and then they’re surrounded, and it’s arrests, and ambulances for the poor bastards Bucky’s done his best to merely maim, and witness statements and through all that Bucky’s hollow, broken, doomed and numb. His mind spirals. 

He’s going to have to move out of their apartment; surely Stark has another floor, but also maybe he could travel? Steve would forgive him his secret — for one, he’s _Steve_ , and for another there’s far too much between them for things to end for something like this. But Bucky, Bucky is going to need some time, he thinks.

Steve is avoiding looking him in the eyes, as they wait for the administration of justice — or what passes for it in 21st Century New York — to run its course around them.

Bucky is zoned out for a while, while they hang around. Natasha stands at a respectful distance, but Bucky can feel her shadowing him silently. He comes to himself some time later in the middle of what appears to be an argument between Steve and Tony.

“This is blackmail,” Steve is saying, arms folded, brow furrowed, glaring at Tony.

“It’s not blackmail, I don’t have anything on you, that was just a straight up threat,” says Tony, irritated but otherwise blasé. 

“Oh for heaven’s sake,” snaps Pepper, who’s watching Bucky with concern.

Bucky looks up at them, subdued. He’s so tired. Pepper’s okay, he thinks, that’s all that matters. Stark has other ideas going on, apparently.

“She’s right, Brooklyn lover boys,” says Stark, infuriating, smug, grating, _fucking_ Tony Stark, to Bucky and to Steve. “I would bet a considerable sum that this here is mutual.”

Bucky clenches his fists and tries not to punch him straight in the face, for Pepper’s sake, and for Pepper’s sake alone.

“I wouldn’t take that bet,” says Sam Wilson, unexpectedly. “Steve? You got something to say here?”

Steve snaps his head round to glare at Wilson. Bucky can’t bear this.

“Steve,” starts Bucky. His own voice sounds broken. Steve turns back to Bucky. His eyes are so wide.

“You love me?” asks Steve, helplessly. “I mean, you… You _love_ me? Me?”

Bucky takes the opportunity to check out the view of his own boots.

“Yes, Steve. I love you. Of course I fucking love you.”

“But…” says Steve, then apparently runs out of words. That’s new, thinks the sarcastic part of Bucky’s brain.

“But?” asks Bucky, resentfully.

“But I love you,” says Steve, and he still sounds lost at sea. “I’ve always loved you.”

Bucky glares at Steve, because it’s not like Steve Fucking Rogers to be disloyal. “And Peggy?” he snaps, hurt on her behalf as well as his own.

Steve just looks at him. “Of course, Peggy,” he confirms, like that’s a given. “But I loved you first. I just didn’t think you… that you…” 

Steve runs out of words again. Bucky is helplessly charmed and starting to realise this thing he’s feeling right now is _hope_. Who’d have believed it?

Steve’s still wordless, but he reaches out a hand towards Bucky. One or both of them move, and then Bucky’s being enfolded in Steve’s arms, and Steve’s forehead is resting on his shoulder. Steve squeezes, and sniffs.

Bucky realises that one of the rent-a-goons has landed a lucky blow and that from the feel of it, his ribs are going to be purple when he finally gets home, accelerated healing aside. He couldn’t, he thinks, at this moment, care less.

“You gonna let me kiss you, Rogers?” he asks. Steve, bless his heart, lifts his head from Bucky’s shoulder and blushes like the virgin he probably still is. He leans in though, and plants a chase smack on Bucky’s forehead. 

“Did I tell you, Rogers, or did I tell you?” calls Sam Wilson, and when Bucky turns around to tell him to go screw himself he finds Steve’s saying it right along with him. 

Bucky is suddenly, wholly, consumingly happy. He buries his face in Steve’s chest.

===

Pepper is watching this display of emotion and trying not to cry. It’s just so beautiful. Natasha is trying very, very hard not to smile and not really succeeding. Sam is grinning, Tony looks like he’s taking a video recording. Pepper slaps him, or at least the suit.

"Ow!” hisses Pepper, examining her fingers. 

Bucky is at her side in a moment, pulling away from Steve and pressing a hand to his ribs, wincing himself.

“Are you hurt?” he asks her.

"It's nothing,” assures Pepper. “I broke a nail. Are _you_ hurt?”

“Ribs,” says Bucky, dismissively. “A bruise. I’m so sorry, Pepper, this is all on me…” he begins. Pepper cuts him off.

"James, you are literally walking around with bruised ribs."

“And you broke a nail!" he protests.

"Barnes, is this you being the gay you never got to be?" asks Tony, wandering up, curious and insensitive as ever. Pepper loves him. 

Steve joins them with a few strides and shyly slides his big hand around Bucky’s waist.

“Oh, no, he's always cared about his hair,” claims Steve. “We had to eat cabbage soup and he was buying pomade, so I can give you plenty of preced— ow!” Steve yelps as Bucky pinches him through the stealth suit.

“Get your hands off me, Barnes,” warns Steve. “Not unless you mean it.” Pepper sees Bucky’s expression and it’s feral. Pepper laughs.

“You have seen my hair without product, Rogers,” says Bucky, changing tack, although he’s grinning at Pepper. He mimes an explosive puff next to both ears with his fingers, blows out his cheeks. “Pfft.”

“Oh dear lord, do we need to lock you in a closet, no pun intended, until you resolve this like a couple of adults?” asks Tony.

“No?” Is the tentative response from Steve. It sounds higher than normal. It occurs to Pepper that they’ve known each other all their lives, but never really touched with what you might call intent. It seems to be occurring to Steve too. Bucky, on the other hand, is smirking like the overgrown feline he is.

“Come on, boys,” sighs Pepper. “Let’s go home.” 

There’s a chorus of agreement. It’s late and everyone’s exhausted. 

Debriefs are rescheduled to the morning, evidence handed over, Happy arrives and then drives all four of them home, Sam Wilson electing to take Steve's motorcycle, Natasha casually riding pillion. Sam tries to look like it’s a hardship and fails entirely, obvious even on what little Pepper can see of his face between the helmet, the goggles and… well, the massive grin. 

The NYPD say they’ll arrange to deliver Bucky’s stolen cycle to its owner. Hank Wallace arrives with lawyers for Linda, and Pepper sees them holding hands in the open back of a police van. There’s tears. Pepper finds it hard to have any sympathy really, but the whole thing is surprisingly sad.

By the time they arrive at the tower, Pepper’s half asleep. They share the elevator, Pepper’s clothes sticking uncomfortably to her skin, her shoes long abandoned back at the docks. She smells like a steam locomotive recently drenched in sweat and alcohol, and set on fire. God, she needs a bath.

Steve pokes at the redundant buttons of the elevator, directing them to the common floor. Pepper can almost hear FRIDAY sigh.

“We're going to hang around here for a bit,” Steve says, shyly. Bucky looks surprised but doesn’t say anything. Over Steve’s shoulder he catches Pepper’s eye, wiggles his eyebrows, gestures to Steve and mouths the word, “Chicken.” Pepper giggles.

“Hey! You’re still gross, watch the soft furnishings!” yells Tony, as they leave and head to the sofas.

“These soft furnishings?” ask Steve and Bucky, in tandem, holding up a cushion apiece. Bucky clutches his cushion to his chest and Pepper watches as Steve wrestles an arm around Bucky’s middle and hauls him backwards so they both fall into the sofa behind them. Bucky wriggles around and tries to batter Steve over the head with the cushion, Steve holding him off with one hand around his waist and another shoved into his face at arms length. 

“Yes, yes, you’re disgusting in so many ways, it’s too cute, stop it,” says Tony. “I mean it.”

The wrestling continues.

“I said stop it!”

Pepper watches as Bucky takes advantage of gravity to press himself into Steve, forcing smooches. From Pepper’s limited vantage point, Steve is flushed bright as a tomato.

Tony’s face is a picture.

“Oh, no. No. Pepper. We’ve witnessed the creation of a monster. Stop it. Stop it!” he yells, totally futile. “Get a room. You better not fuck on this sofa! You hear me, Barnes? Barnes?"

Pepper laughs and laughs, draws Tony away, her hand under his elbow. She tugs him back into the elevator, while Tony’s still hurling threats and promises to send the cleaning bill to Steve.

“Upstairs, Tony,” she says, gently. “I need a shower, it has been such a long day, please. We can afford the cleaners. You can let them besmirch the common room in the name of true love and your dignity will live to rise another day.”

“Fine!” bawls Tony, into the cavernous room. “See if I care!”

Barnes and Rogers break it off long enough to reposition themselves so they can yell their goodnights. Steve is red as a New York fire truck, from neckline to hairline.

Pepper winks at Steve, and turns to peck Tony briefly on the cheek. She smiles at Bucky across the room, resting in the arms of his man, Bucky’s back up against Steve’s chest, Steve's flushed chin hooked over Bucky’s shoulder. Pepper and Tony wave, and as the doors close Bucky raises one metal middle finger, flipping them off, his smile broad and wide.

___o0o___

THE END

——o0o——

  
  



End file.
